Why was this marked as flamebait? It's a valid argument. We do good things because they feel good; altruism is an adaptive trait, not a mark of enlightenment. Yes, the poster is obviously a raging cynic, but the statement that giving is not inherently meaningful does not deserve flippant derision.
If a user really wants to install it, they they need to run an application much like OS X's Net Info manager which they had to specially type in a string text to enable the root account.
This is a great way to get everyone to buy the competitor's OS because yours is "too inconvenient."
The point is that works which are (relatively speaking) not a good investment, often have greater artistic merit than those which are easy sells. There is no shortage today of Disney idols, who lose relevance after three years and fall off the radar but are replaced immediately. If squeezed, the industry could run on nothing but manufactured pop, and show better profits. If they "suffered from failure" as you propose, that is exactly what they would do. Removing their ability to take risks would lose us the diamonds, not the sand.
I've seen one reasonable argument for maintaining copyright even if only the record labels receive the money.
The gist is that it's very expensive to scout and publish new talent, and it's a gamble on top of that—you get more duds than hits. Residual royalties from old best-sellers create a buffer, allowing labels to range farther afield and publish long shots who might otherwise be passed over as too risky; this in turn makes it easier for new artists to enter the industry.
Cynicism will answer that the corporate publishers in question will funnel that money to shareholders and executives rather than edgy new talent, and (US) corporate law would seem to enforce this view. Still, it's a very compelling argument, and "responsibility to the shareholders" includes the responsibility to create new properties as older ones devaluate, so the methodology of the corporate machine doesn't completely negate its practical application.
That is an astonishingly good idea! Twenty years is plenty of time to gather the resources to bring something to market, so the free period removes the barrier to entry; after that period, it's effectively real estate. The only addition I would make is that the owner should be permitted to adjust the stated value (annually, when taxes are payed).
It seems like the single most prevalent fallacy in online debate today is calling "fallacy" when there isn't one. Ad hominem is a fallacy of irrelevance; it is only a fallacy when it is irrelevant.
If a person is claiming to be an expert, and it can be shown that they are not, that person's "expert" testimony is invalidated. Calling a debator on the appeal to false authority fallacy is a perfectly valid tactic, and in fact extremely important for the proliferation of well-vetted ideas. That is what was done here; K. said, essentially, "a majority of engineers are not qualified to make marketing-related design decisions." Debate this if you will. Don't call it an attack, because it isn't; and if you can't see the difference, then you're not qualified to debate anything in the first place (note the conditional on this statement, and apply it to itself).
Even if the false authority and the debator happen to be the same person, by the way, this does not make the statement "you haven't got the foggiest clue what you're talking about" an ad hominem fallacy if it is based on demonstrable grounds.
I haven't felt the need to be this anal with terminology since college. Clearly I should read Slashdot more often: it keeps me on my toes.
To be honest, patching is one of the things that puts PC games ahead in my book. I'll grant you, the "ship it buggy and fix it later" side of things sucks... but few companies deliberately do that. Meanwhile, other companies use patches for something much better: adding additional content. Kohan, Diablo II, and various others have become progressively better, not to mention gaining new replay value. To me, patching provides the ability to stretch my dollar investment that much further. And yeah, not many companies do it that way... but I rarely buy a game until a few months after its release anyway, and by then I can find out online which way things are going.
Very well put. If you don't know how to play the game, you will ultimately fail in the competetive marketplace. Companies with poor products who bully their way to the top will generally do better than companies with superior products who play nice. But while human nature enforces this duality to a degree, it's still an artificial one... a company with a superior product can be a bully if it wants to, and they'll have market advantage over the other bullies. It'd be nice if things didn't have to be that way, but since they do... hey, Timegate? Please start kicking people randomly in the shins. Long as Kings Of War rocks as hard as Ahriman's Gift, I will be happy.
I actually did set that to "plain text" the first time I posted it, all nicely paragraphized. Hit the Preview button to make sure it looked right. It did!
Then/. grumbled at me about being unable to process it, and my being behind a firewall (I think my session expired, I'd been writing all day during free moments at work, but then how did even Preview work? No clue what the firewall has to do with anything).
So I copied, pasted, re-posted. It grumbled about me not taking 20 seconds between "reply" and "submit" (and also mentioned the firewall again, who knows why). Sweet holy mother of fuck, that's annoying.
So I posted it a third time, with a nice long wait, and forgot to switch from HTML to text.
And according to community dogma, that's entirely my fault. (Well, I should have hit Preview!)
THIS is precisely what's wrong with the open-source community in general, at least the face of it -- and yes, the face does matter, regardless of what's underneath. A perfectly profound example, far better than the rambling explanations of my first post. Thanks for that, um, maybe?
In a roundabout way I agree with you, in principle, but I vehemently disagree in practice. My ideal, see, is convenience. Convenience is what technology and progress are all about. Making things simpler, cheaper, more accessible. Convenience drives innovation, it drives market value, it drives society as a whole, and not just on the consumer end.
I used to have the free time to hack my way through just about anything, but these days I have other goals and priorities. When the computer was a toy and a hobby, teaching myself rudimentary C and Make to port Slash'EM to OS/2 was a fun and rewarding way to spend a weekend. (And hey, they put me in the credits too!) Now, though, the computer is a tool -- and the job of a tool is to function and then get out of the way. Yes, the Office Assistant gets in the way... but not detecting my modem, supplying a list which includes only a rough equivalent, and then locking up solid when I send an ATI query, which Lycoris did this weekend when I decided to give Linux its annual chance to prove functional on my desktop, gets in the way much MUCH more.
And by solid, I mean SOLID. Wouldn't close. Apparently the folks at Lycoris decided xkill wasn't user-friendly (I'm assuming rtclk-close is a soft kill, because it didn't work), and instead of browsing the ps list I tried logging out, at which point I hit a black screen with a cursor from which no ctrl-alt-foo would save me. Had to hit the power button. And I managed this within five minutes of first boot.
Maybe it's just Lycoris, and I should "try another distro." But I'm an impatient end-user these days; I've got no special need to leave Windows, so it's the competition's job to seduce me. An article on Lycoris got me curious, made me check. Maybe I'll compare Mandrake again, for kicks, but probaby not for a while. Debian was nice, but too many options: just picking what to install took over an hour. I don't have the time to waste on browsing shiny new tools when the ones I've got work perfectly well and fit my tasks in ways the competition doesn't, plus half the new ones are broken.
There is no difference between a gamble and an investment, until such time as you see a clear return. So far Linux has not shown itself to be an investment for me. Wine and WineX could almost carry the transition if I didn't have to go out and buy new hardware before I can even see if they're functional yet. (And by "functional" I mean I want to play Morrowind and Diablo II. Kohan actually has a Linux version, so I'm good there.)
I do value freedom: the freedom to use my time for whatever I choose, not for setting up and facilitating the eventual possibility of what I choose. Yes, I spend a while after any Windows install tweaking things to my liking -- but that's not the same as spending time after a Linux install getting things to work AT ALL. I'm forced to do something inconvenient to reach zero, rather than starting at zero and being given the opportunity to add should I so please.
Could I make it work if I tried? Of course. I've done it many times in the past. My ideal, though, is that computers should get out of the way and let you work. Microsoft superficially violates this with their dumbed-down, intrusive interfaces, but I can turn Clippy off with a few clicks; I can't turn my modem on without a lot of coding and architecture knowledge. As an IT professional, I've found that this ideal is a wonderful guide for my job: I try to implement it for my fellow employees. Get the computers out of their way. And as my time fills up with hobbies and side-projects and tempting alternate careers, more and more I demand that those who supply my own IT tools do the same for me.
Seduce me, Linux. Impress me. Make me not even notice you're there, except when things are suddenly dramatically easier than they used to be. XP did that. I've a hunch that Panther would do it a dozen times over again, if I were willing to switch hardware platforms (but the sheer inconvenience of that kills OS X as an option outright). Offer me everything the competition does, and then put an irresistable cherry on top and drop it to zero calories without sacrificing the flavor.
All you have to do is be the downhill path; the ever-liquid market will flow by itself.
Or at the very least, recognize my modem. Please?
There's an important distinction to be made between controlling the interface vocally, and simply dictating text. The former has all of the problems you mentioned; the latter not so much, especially for natural language. (Coding... not so good.)
Since years before the Tablet PCs came out, I've envisioned a letter-sized PDA, with the standard stylus interface and voice dictation. Stylus is excellent for interface control, simple and efficient; but I regularly found myself using my old Palm III as a place to write down ideas, and while the nifty collapsing keyboard made that MUCH easier, it was hard to use without a stable flat surface to put it on, and I certainly couldn't use it while walking or driving. Better still, with today's larger screens and more powerful processors, you could create a true virtual sketchpad utilizing concepts from this tactile interface design: the ability to write anywhere, in two dimensions (with rotation, too), then draw circles and lines connecting phrases, and little sketches here and there, all of which are kept track of as objects, and made mobile -- with the connecting lines kept track of! (otherwise I'm describing the average paint program.) A thought-organizing system that doesn't have to know or care what you mean, but helps you remember how you'd linked it together, and allows you to look at it all from different angles. Sort of like a much more intuitive, real-time-modifiable equivalent to <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/brain/">the KurzweilAI.net Brain</a>. Then again, I've yet to actually look at a Tablet PC. Is something like this implemented?
But I digress. The basic point of speech interfaces is this: when you're sitting down at a table and doing nothing but interacting with your computer, mouse and keyboard are tremendously effective. Not so much when you've got other things you want to do with your time, or with your hands. The current interface is, in a nutshell, DEMANDING. It allows for very little real-world multitasking.
Off on a tangent -- the second reason, after threatened profits, that MS hates Open Source so much is a viceral hatred by Gates et al of the cooperative aspects of software development. It's akin to communism, as far a Gates and other really hardline neocons are concerned. It's an ideological nightmare for them.
It's not Open Source that Bill has been ragging on. It's the GPL. And the GPL is not akin to communism; it is distilled totalitarian communism in its purest, most oppressive form. Stallman's stated goal is to prevent programmers from making a profit off of their creations. (Paid for the time spent creating it, perhaps, but no royalties.)
And you're right: this is anathema to Gates and his ilk. Mind you, his ilk include authors, musicians, and pretty much everyone else who would like to own the right to do what they will with the things they create, even if they may have based some tiny part of that work on the work of another. Essentially, the GPL overrules the fair use and derivation aspects of copyright law. So I suppose the question becomes, should copyright law apply to software at all?
To me, as long as software takes effort to create, yes it should. There is, however, one place where I believe an infectious, self-propegating, GPL-like, brutally open license should apply: data formatting standards. In essence, I think we've got it backwards -- let people license their software however they want to, but make damn sure everyone can read and write the same files! Ogg Vorbis is the Right Thing. And I can play it through oh-so-proprietary QuickTime if I wanna. (Not that I do. But... yeah.)
even if they would have a clue, they can't fuck up her machine, since she won't even know (and doesn't need to know) the root password.
Can't help pointing out that you could do the same with W2K or XP. Linux is not the only OS with user restriction options.
For many years, I was a die-hard OS/2 user. IBM finally killed that. I tried switching to Linux (this was before I read the GPL), but over time I found myself spending more and more time dual booting to Windows. And while it frustrates me that there are some things I really can't do, at least not easily, from within Windows, they're relatively minor things that I don't run into on a daily basis. They're power user things, and while I certainly qualify for that title, lately I've been less gung-ho to do things just because I can.
And as for the reason I found myself gravitating toward windows: well, it's really simple. Games.
New games: Sure, there are a few Linux releases, but the vast majority of commercial PC games are for Windows. And with the exception of Nethack, the non-commercial ones generally don't compete. I'm sure there's a good Linux RTS out there somewhere (haven't looked), but when my neighbor throws a LAN party, and everyone brings their Windows machines, I'd be wishing I could join the Warcraft III action.
Old games: OS/2 had fantastic legacy DOS support, and so does Windows. On Linux, you've got to set that up by hand, and it's not 100% compatible. (Granted, XP has problems with VESA.) I can not, will not live without Civilization, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Wizardry VII, Ultima Underworld... but I've got a job now, and a social life, and I can't geek around like I did in high school, tinkering all night to get them to run. (And if anyone's going to reply with, "Dude, it's fully documented and takes thirty seconds," let me preemptively respond: on Windows, it takes zero seconds, and the documents are far easier to find and access -- which is honestly pathetic, because the Windows help system blows. Computers exist to help people be lazy. Linux wasn't doing its job.)
I think the single most deciding factor keeping people on Windows, really, is convenience. I don't mean the inherent convenience of using operating system; I mean the convenience of being able to walk into your local consumer electronics store and find software to fit your needs. Hell, you can buy Age of Empires at Sam Goody.
Yeah... maybe this is all because of Microsoft's unfair business practises. But really, there's an upside to it. Do you remember the early 80s? Will Lode Runner run on my Apple II? Is that copy of WordStar for C64, or for PC? I do not long for the days of splintered platforms. Sometimes, having a choice is not as important as having a standard. Developers can write for Win32, and know they'll have a customer base. Consumers can buy Win32, and know they'll have easy access to software.
Sure, Win32 kind of sucks techincally, and has terribly restrictive licensing. But frankly, the GPL is worse (too bad FreeBSD didn't become the fad; I'd happily run that on a Zaurus), and ultimately Linux is no grail itself. The unix architecture was designed over thirty years ago. Come on... we can do better than that now.
Ten years down the line, everyone in the consumer markets will have moved to Oxygen or some equivalent. Until then, as mentioned, I'd rather have a standard of questionable quality than have no standard at all.
(This is my first Slashdot comment. Gee... good thing I hit Preview. C'mon, guys, LiveJournal has code for intelligent autoformatting of line breaks, and they're open-source too. Steal it, implement it, because typing <p>...</p> over and over again is entirly unnecessary, except maybe to those who'd rather have an exclusive club than a public forum, and enjoy laughing when someone's post is a long block of unbroken text. And if you can figure out why this paragraph is 100% topical to the linux-on-desktop issue, you get a cookie.)
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Why was this marked as flamebait? It's a valid argument. We do good things because they feel good; altruism is an adaptive trait, not a mark of enlightenment. Yes, the poster is obviously a raging cynic, but the statement that giving is not inherently meaningful does not deserve flippant derision.
If a user really wants to install it, they they need to run an application much like OS X's Net Info manager which they had to specially type in a string text to enable the root account.
This is a great way to get everyone to buy the competitor's OS because yours is "too inconvenient."
The point is that works which are (relatively speaking) not a good investment, often have greater artistic merit than those which are easy sells. There is no shortage today of Disney idols, who lose relevance after three years and fall off the radar but are replaced immediately. If squeezed, the industry could run on nothing but manufactured pop, and show better profits. If they "suffered from failure" as you propose, that is exactly what they would do. Removing their ability to take risks would lose us the diamonds, not the sand.
I've seen one reasonable argument for maintaining copyright even if only the record labels receive the money.
The gist is that it's very expensive to scout and publish new talent, and it's a gamble on top of that—you get more duds than hits. Residual royalties from old best-sellers create a buffer, allowing labels to range farther afield and publish long shots who might otherwise be passed over as too risky; this in turn makes it easier for new artists to enter the industry.
Cynicism will answer that the corporate publishers in question will funnel that money to shareholders and executives rather than edgy new talent, and (US) corporate law would seem to enforce this view. Still, it's a very compelling argument, and "responsibility to the shareholders" includes the responsibility to create new properties as older ones devaluate, so the methodology of the corporate machine doesn't completely negate its practical application.
That is an astonishingly good idea! Twenty years is plenty of time to gather the resources to bring something to market, so the free period removes the barrier to entry; after that period, it's effectively real estate. The only addition I would make is that the owner should be permitted to adjust the stated value (annually, when taxes are payed).
It seems like the single most prevalent fallacy in online debate today is calling "fallacy" when there isn't one. Ad hominem is a fallacy of irrelevance; it is only a fallacy when it is irrelevant.
If a person is claiming to be an expert, and it can be shown that they are not, that person's "expert" testimony is invalidated. Calling a debator on the appeal to false authority fallacy is a perfectly valid tactic, and in fact extremely important for the proliferation of well-vetted ideas. That is what was done here; K. said, essentially, "a majority of engineers are not qualified to make marketing-related design decisions." Debate this if you will. Don't call it an attack, because it isn't; and if you can't see the difference, then you're not qualified to debate anything in the first place (note the conditional on this statement, and apply it to itself).
Even if the false authority and the debator happen to be the same person, by the way, this does not make the statement "you haven't got the foggiest clue what you're talking about" an ad hominem fallacy if it is based on demonstrable grounds.
I haven't felt the need to be this anal with terminology since college. Clearly I should read Slashdot more often: it keeps me on my toes.
[...]happen to know precisely what a head-lexicalized context-free grammer is. (And, no, reading Chomsky is not the way to find out what it is).
I don't know if you actually meant this as a dig at Chomsky's writing style, but I laughed my ass off.
To be honest, patching is one of the things that puts PC games ahead in my book. I'll grant you, the "ship it buggy and fix it later" side of things sucks... but few companies deliberately do that. Meanwhile, other companies use patches for something much better: adding additional content. Kohan, Diablo II, and various others have become progressively better, not to mention gaining new replay value. To me, patching provides the ability to stretch my dollar investment that much further. And yeah, not many companies do it that way... but I rarely buy a game until a few months after its release anyway, and by then I can find out online which way things are going.
Very well put. If you don't know how to play the game, you will ultimately fail in the competetive marketplace. Companies with poor products who bully their way to the top will generally do better than companies with superior products who play nice. But while human nature enforces this duality to a degree, it's still an artificial one... a company with a superior product can be a bully if it wants to, and they'll have market advantage over the other bullies. It'd be nice if things didn't have to be that way, but since they do... hey, Timegate? Please start kicking people randomly in the shins. Long as Kings Of War rocks as hard as Ahriman's Gift, I will be happy.
Fuck you, Slashdot.
/. grumbled at me about being unable to process it, and my being behind a firewall (I think my session expired, I'd been writing all day during free moments at work, but then how did even Preview work? No clue what the firewall has to do with anything).
I actually did set that to "plain text" the first time I posted it, all nicely paragraphized. Hit the Preview button to make sure it looked right. It did!
Then
So I copied, pasted, re-posted. It grumbled about me not taking 20 seconds between "reply" and "submit" (and also mentioned the firewall again, who knows why). Sweet holy mother of fuck, that's annoying.
So I posted it a third time, with a nice long wait, and forgot to switch from HTML to text.
And according to community dogma, that's entirely my fault. (Well, I should have hit Preview!)
THIS is precisely what's wrong with the open-source community in general, at least the face of it -- and yes, the face does matter, regardless of what's underneath. A perfectly profound example, far better than the rambling explanations of my first post. Thanks for that, um, maybe?
In a roundabout way I agree with you, in principle, but I vehemently disagree in practice. My ideal, see, is convenience. Convenience is what technology and progress are all about. Making things simpler, cheaper, more accessible. Convenience drives innovation, it drives market value, it drives society as a whole, and not just on the consumer end. I used to have the free time to hack my way through just about anything, but these days I have other goals and priorities. When the computer was a toy and a hobby, teaching myself rudimentary C and Make to port Slash'EM to OS/2 was a fun and rewarding way to spend a weekend. (And hey, they put me in the credits too!) Now, though, the computer is a tool -- and the job of a tool is to function and then get out of the way. Yes, the Office Assistant gets in the way... but not detecting my modem, supplying a list which includes only a rough equivalent, and then locking up solid when I send an ATI query, which Lycoris did this weekend when I decided to give Linux its annual chance to prove functional on my desktop, gets in the way much MUCH more. And by solid, I mean SOLID. Wouldn't close. Apparently the folks at Lycoris decided xkill wasn't user-friendly (I'm assuming rtclk-close is a soft kill, because it didn't work), and instead of browsing the ps list I tried logging out, at which point I hit a black screen with a cursor from which no ctrl-alt-foo would save me. Had to hit the power button. And I managed this within five minutes of first boot. Maybe it's just Lycoris, and I should "try another distro." But I'm an impatient end-user these days; I've got no special need to leave Windows, so it's the competition's job to seduce me. An article on Lycoris got me curious, made me check. Maybe I'll compare Mandrake again, for kicks, but probaby not for a while. Debian was nice, but too many options: just picking what to install took over an hour. I don't have the time to waste on browsing shiny new tools when the ones I've got work perfectly well and fit my tasks in ways the competition doesn't, plus half the new ones are broken. There is no difference between a gamble and an investment, until such time as you see a clear return. So far Linux has not shown itself to be an investment for me. Wine and WineX could almost carry the transition if I didn't have to go out and buy new hardware before I can even see if they're functional yet. (And by "functional" I mean I want to play Morrowind and Diablo II. Kohan actually has a Linux version, so I'm good there.) I do value freedom: the freedom to use my time for whatever I choose, not for setting up and facilitating the eventual possibility of what I choose. Yes, I spend a while after any Windows install tweaking things to my liking -- but that's not the same as spending time after a Linux install getting things to work AT ALL. I'm forced to do something inconvenient to reach zero, rather than starting at zero and being given the opportunity to add should I so please. Could I make it work if I tried? Of course. I've done it many times in the past. My ideal, though, is that computers should get out of the way and let you work. Microsoft superficially violates this with their dumbed-down, intrusive interfaces, but I can turn Clippy off with a few clicks; I can't turn my modem on without a lot of coding and architecture knowledge. As an IT professional, I've found that this ideal is a wonderful guide for my job: I try to implement it for my fellow employees. Get the computers out of their way. And as my time fills up with hobbies and side-projects and tempting alternate careers, more and more I demand that those who supply my own IT tools do the same for me. Seduce me, Linux. Impress me. Make me not even notice you're there, except when things are suddenly dramatically easier than they used to be. XP did that. I've a hunch that Panther would do it a dozen times over again, if I were willing to switch hardware platforms (but the sheer inconvenience of that kills OS X as an option outright). Offer me everything the competition does, and then put an irresistable cherry on top and drop it to zero calories without sacrificing the flavor. All you have to do is be the downhill path; the ever-liquid market will flow by itself. Or at the very least, recognize my modem. Please?
There's an important distinction to be made between controlling the interface vocally, and simply dictating text. The former has all of the problems you mentioned; the latter not so much, especially for natural language. (Coding... not so good.)
Since years before the Tablet PCs came out, I've envisioned a letter-sized PDA, with the standard stylus interface and voice dictation. Stylus is excellent for interface control, simple and efficient; but I regularly found myself using my old Palm III as a place to write down ideas, and while the nifty collapsing keyboard made that MUCH easier, it was hard to use without a stable flat surface to put it on, and I certainly couldn't use it while walking or driving. Better still, with today's larger screens and more powerful processors, you could create a true virtual sketchpad utilizing concepts from this tactile interface design: the ability to write anywhere, in two dimensions (with rotation, too), then draw circles and lines connecting phrases, and little sketches here and there, all of which are kept track of as objects, and made mobile -- with the connecting lines kept track of! (otherwise I'm describing the average paint program.) A thought-organizing system that doesn't have to know or care what you mean, but helps you remember how you'd linked it together, and allows you to look at it all from different angles. Sort of like a much more intuitive, real-time-modifiable equivalent to <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/brain/">the KurzweilAI.net Brain</a>. Then again, I've yet to actually look at a Tablet PC. Is something like this implemented?
But I digress. The basic point of speech interfaces is this: when you're sitting down at a table and doing nothing but interacting with your computer, mouse and keyboard are tremendously effective. Not so much when you've got other things you want to do with your time, or with your hands. The current interface is, in a nutshell, DEMANDING. It allows for very little real-world multitasking.
Off on a tangent -- the second reason, after threatened profits, that MS hates Open Source so much is a viceral hatred by Gates et al of the cooperative aspects of software development. It's akin to communism, as far a Gates and other really hardline neocons are concerned. It's an ideological nightmare for them.
It's not Open Source that Bill has been ragging on. It's the GPL. And the GPL is not akin to communism; it is distilled totalitarian communism in its purest, most oppressive form. Stallman's stated goal is to prevent programmers from making a profit off of their creations. (Paid for the time spent creating it, perhaps, but no royalties.)
And you're right: this is anathema to Gates and his ilk. Mind you, his ilk include authors, musicians, and pretty much everyone else who would like to own the right to do what they will with the things they create, even if they may have based some tiny part of that work on the work of another. Essentially, the GPL overrules the fair use and derivation aspects of copyright law. So I suppose the question becomes, should copyright law apply to software at all?
To me, as long as software takes effort to create, yes it should. There is, however, one place where I believe an infectious, self-propegating, GPL-like, brutally open license should apply: data formatting standards. In essence, I think we've got it backwards -- let people license their software however they want to, but make damn sure everyone can read and write the same files! Ogg Vorbis is the Right Thing. And I can play it through oh-so-proprietary QuickTime if I wanna. (Not that I do. But... yeah.)
even if they would have a clue, they can't fuck up her machine, since she won't even know (and doesn't need to know) the root password.
Can't help pointing out that you could do the same with W2K or XP. Linux is not the only OS with user restriction options.
For many years, I was a die-hard OS/2 user. IBM finally killed that. I tried switching to Linux (this was before I read the GPL), but over time I found myself spending more and more time dual booting to Windows. And while it frustrates me that there are some things I really can't do, at least not easily, from within Windows, they're relatively minor things that I don't run into on a daily basis. They're power user things, and while I certainly qualify for that title, lately I've been less gung-ho to do things just because I can.
And as for the reason I found myself gravitating toward windows: well, it's really simple. Games.
New games: Sure, there are a few Linux releases, but the vast majority of commercial PC games are for Windows. And with the exception of Nethack, the non-commercial ones generally don't compete. I'm sure there's a good Linux RTS out there somewhere (haven't looked), but when my neighbor throws a LAN party, and everyone brings their Windows machines, I'd be wishing I could join the Warcraft III action.
Old games: OS/2 had fantastic legacy DOS support, and so does Windows. On Linux, you've got to set that up by hand, and it's not 100% compatible. (Granted, XP has problems with VESA.) I can not, will not live without Civilization, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Wizardry VII, Ultima Underworld... but I've got a job now, and a social life, and I can't geek around like I did in high school, tinkering all night to get them to run. (And if anyone's going to reply with, "Dude, it's fully documented and takes thirty seconds," let me preemptively respond: on Windows, it takes zero seconds, and the documents are far easier to find and access -- which is honestly pathetic, because the Windows help system blows. Computers exist to help people be lazy. Linux wasn't doing its job.)
I think the single most deciding factor keeping people on Windows, really, is convenience. I don't mean the inherent convenience of using operating system; I mean the convenience of being able to walk into your local consumer electronics store and find software to fit your needs. Hell, you can buy Age of Empires at Sam Goody.
Yeah... maybe this is all because of Microsoft's unfair business practises. But really, there's an upside to it. Do you remember the early 80s? Will Lode Runner run on my Apple II? Is that copy of WordStar for C64, or for PC? I do not long for the days of splintered platforms. Sometimes, having a choice is not as important as having a standard. Developers can write for Win32, and know they'll have a customer base. Consumers can buy Win32, and know they'll have easy access to software.
Sure, Win32 kind of sucks techincally, and has terribly restrictive licensing. But frankly, the GPL is worse (too bad FreeBSD didn't become the fad; I'd happily run that on a Zaurus), and ultimately Linux is no grail itself. The unix architecture was designed over thirty years ago. Come on... we can do better than that now.
Ten years down the line, everyone in the consumer markets will have moved to Oxygen or some equivalent. Until then, as mentioned, I'd rather have a standard of questionable quality than have no standard at all.
(This is my first Slashdot comment. Gee... good thing I hit Preview. C'mon, guys, LiveJournal has code for intelligent autoformatting of line breaks, and they're open-source too. Steal it, implement it, because typing <p>...</p> over and over again is entirly unnecessary, except maybe to those who'd rather have an exclusive club than a public forum, and enjoy laughing when someone's post is a long block of unbroken text. And if you can figure out why this paragraph is 100% topical to the linux-on-desktop issue, you get a cookie.)