I think that from the view of Average Windows User Joe, who's not too terribly smart or computer savvy, Windows Update is just an annoyance. It wants him to click on a million different widgets and wait for three scans and then, of course in MS style, reboot his computer. He's just going to click the little X button in the corner because he has no clue WHY windows needs Patch #nknknknk that gets rid of the "Cannot open file from recycling bin" error message in such and such version of this and that thing.
Maybe I just don't use Windows often enough, but last time it took me ages to update - I got several things that had to be installed by themselves, so I had to keep going back and clicking on "install updates" again and again. I thought this was AUTO Update. So why is it keeping me from doing something else? Windows kept putting its download progress in one of those pop-over windows that you can't minimize, only close, so in the end I just had to sit while it installed. The most annoying thing of all was, a bunch of those updates were "DirectX 9.0b upgrade" and other such things that I have no idea why I should need. But of course, if you click the remove button, Windows Update brings them back next time.
That's a problem - Windows Update should really take out some of those "really extremely urgently critical and vital and necessary" updates that are just some upgrade to let your instant messenger have a longer buddy list. It would stop causing so many more new bugs - just a lower probability. Then people like me, at least, would pay more attention to it.
That's what isn't true. Windows's accounts other than admin are so restricted that you can't install many programs without being logged in as admin. The point was, this is Microsoft being stupid. Plenty of people who run Windows as admin do it solely because it's the only way to get permission for anything to function. They wouldn't run Linux that way because it is better designed, and therefore it isn't necessary to take that kind of security risk.
I entirely agree with the parent poster that lie detectors are silly. They do measure stress. They don't detect lies. I've never actually had my "voice stress" measured, but I have had sensors measuring my skin temperature and muscle tension, which are supposedly reliable indicators of stress. The doctor graphed the data from the sensors and asked me questions. I don't remember lying to her outright, but it's not like me to entirely tell the truth. Then she asked, "Why don't you tell me why you're here for therapy?" She pressed a button on the computer, and when she showed me later, it had marked the spot on the graph where she asked that question. The little lines from the sensors went crazy at a moment when I was just as truthful as any other, or maybe a bit more so.
Maybe the data showed telltale responses when I was telling the truth at the beginning of that session and when I was fudging it a bit. I don't know. But when I was really under stress, the STRESS detector showed it.
If you really want to know, I think the most dimension-bloated version of string theory has 26 dimensions. But most of them are so rolled up on themselves that even the string theorists say you can ignore them.
If you're such a Grammar Nazi, remember to put an apostrophe in "that's";)
And the subject line should be "What kind of e ffect will this have on literacy?"
Besides nitpicking at other people's grammar, I'll add that I've had friends pass me notes written this way. It's not just one "u" instead of "you," either. It's the whole message full of ridiculous acronyms and letters-instead-of-words. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason for that.
I just tried that, and it did run Konqueror as root, but when I got out of root's directory I guess it reverted to my normal user, and I couldn't change the permissions on the cd or floppy drives.
So I figured maybe you could run Konqueror with a directory to start at, so I did "kdesu konqueror/mnt". That brought up the "this action needs root privileges" dialog again, but when Konqueror loaded the cd-rom and floppy drive icons had little locks on them and I still could not change them.
I am quite a newbie, but that still sounds very wrong to me.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux (did you notice my nickname?) but here's one of the problems I have with it on my desktop. It's not the lack of pretty widgets, but it's related. When I want to read/write stuff from either floppies or CDs, it won't let me in because I don't have permission to do this. It wants me to be logged in as root before I use the disk drives. So I go and try to log in as root, and the thing gets all mad at me because it doesn't want me to use a GUI as root! It's dangerous! What is this, act like Microsoft day? (Personally, I think I'd probably be a worse danger using the command line as root. I've messed up a few, er, experiments with "kill"....) I don't know if this always happens or it's just Mandrake, or whatever.
Anywho, here's the story of the first time I tried to do this. I tried to ignore the thing's warning messages and use KDE, because I don't know what special stuff you have to do to mount a cd burner drive thing on the command line (again, I'm new at this) and KDE got very upset; I'm borderline on saying parts of it didn't work that time as root. I got all confused because the cursor was in the little watch shape, but it didn't appear to be in the middle of doing anything. The drive looked mounted; I tried to copy the files, and Konqueror promptly crashed, only time it's ever crashed for me.
What ended up saving me was: this was all on my laptop, and it holds either a CD or floppy drive but not both at once. So I shut down the computer and restart it with the floppy in. Mandrake recognized my different hardware on boot and gave me a list of options, which I set to what I thought will let me copy the files, and lo and behold, it worked. Of course, by now I've switched the drives again a bunch of times and the settings went back. I think they actually reset to default as soon as I restarted, but I'm not positive.
You could make the case that that was just me being stupid, but if you're going to start putting Linux on everyone's desktop, they aren't going to magically know how to do it properly either. And lots of them are going to want to do it in the GUI. (There are your missing government necessary widgets, just to prove I'm not off topic.) Using CD and floppy drives is something normal people with isolated type of desktop computers do all the time, and figuring this out is going to need to get easier.
In fact, could someone explain to me why you need root privileges to read and write to the CD or floppy? That doesn't make any sense, at least for desktop use.
(Disclaimer: I'm not angry. This is not a troll. I like Linux and I'm just relating a problem I had with it. Which is likely due to me being a blockhead.)
You're talking about two different things. The idea is that (literally and metaphorically) Gnome's dialog is supposed to have a help button, and doesn't. MS office's isn't supposed to have a help button, and doesn't. It seems that you're both justifiably annoyed, for different reasons. MS is bad at giving users any information and fixing bugs, which is a valid reason to be mad at MS. Linux is newer and in some respects not ready to be used by normal, varyingly computer-illiterate people, which is a valid reason to be mad at Linux. But you're on two different wavelengths and you don't have a reason to be mad at each other. There. Did I fix it?
To get to the point. I don't think I'd recommend it to Sally Secretary yet. - How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Training isn't a factor for normal users. Personally, I don't think you understood the problem. Sally Secretary could learn how to use Linux easily with more graphical, user-friendly distro and apps. But whoever posted "Not quite ready" is right, Linux needs a touch-up job first. I think it needs a little more time during which some more people look at it from a "take-this-thing-to-normal-joe's-desktop" point of view. There are some things that ought to be fixed before users with way less computer knowledge use it. For example, in KDE the app - maybe the only app that's ever crashed on me is, of all things, the help function, and it's happened repeatedly. Not only do I not figure out how to do whatever I'm looking up, it's terribly disheartening.
there are programs other than PM that can resize ntfs.
For example, Mandrake's Diskdrake, which is part of the easy installation too;) I'm new at this, I first installed Linux dual-boot in April, and at that point Diskdrake was the only free (free as in no money) program I could find that could resize NTFS partitions. The bother about it is that it only runs DURING Mandrake's installation procedure. However, people say you can just run Diskdrake, cancel the install, and then install another distro.
There's probably some other program out there by now that does this but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
That's why there are so many distros, isn't it? Everyone has different tastes, so everyone can find one that pretty much fits their needs. Though it does seem that a lot of people use Slackware.
Actually, on the Debian site there is a really long, informative guide for people really new to Unix commands. I went from "isn't cd.. one of those commands?" to being able to move stuff around, find things, run everything from the command line. That's pretty good newbie help from my point of view.
I actually don't use Debian though, I use Mandrake, and though I haven't checked out Gentoo, I find that Mandrake was very, very helpful to my overwhelmed newbie mind. Knowledgeable users are great, but when I'm still struggling to set it up what I really want is a "Please do it all for me!" button.
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3 years old. Wow, how did they do all that in three years?
Are you sure? Isn't it radii? us->i, um->a.
Maybe I just don't use Windows often enough, but last time it took me ages to update - I got several things that had to be installed by themselves, so I had to keep going back and clicking on "install updates" again and again. I thought this was AUTO Update. So why is it keeping me from doing something else? Windows kept putting its download progress in one of those pop-over windows that you can't minimize, only close, so in the end I just had to sit while it installed. The most annoying thing of all was, a bunch of those updates were "DirectX 9.0b upgrade" and other such things that I have no idea why I should need. But of course, if you click the remove button, Windows Update brings them back next time.
That's a problem - Windows Update should really take out some of those "really extremely urgently critical and vital and necessary" updates that are just some upgrade to let your instant messenger have a longer buddy list. It would stop causing so many more new bugs - just a lower probability. Then people like me, at least, would pay more attention to it.
That's what isn't true. Windows's accounts other than admin are so restricted that you can't install many programs without being logged in as admin. The point was, this is Microsoft being stupid. Plenty of people who run Windows as admin do it solely because it's the only way to get permission for anything to function. They wouldn't run Linux that way because it is better designed, and therefore it isn't necessary to take that kind of security risk.
Maybe the data showed telltale responses when I was telling the truth at the beginning of that session and when I was fudging it a bit. I don't know. But when I was really under stress, the STRESS detector showed it.
If you really want to know, I think the most dimension-bloated version of string theory has 26 dimensions. But most of them are so rolled up on themselves that even the string theorists say you can ignore them.
Stay off the web? But isn't the original poster getting all this vital advice from the web? ;)
And the subject line should be "What kind of e ffect will this have on literacy?"
Besides nitpicking at other people's grammar, I'll add that I've had friends pass me notes written this way. It's not just one "u" instead of "you," either. It's the whole message full of ridiculous acronyms and letters-instead-of-words. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason for that.
The FAQ on the article says that it took word frequencies out of Beowulf, so maybe that's not a disadvantage ;)
So I figured maybe you could run Konqueror with a directory to start at, so I did "kdesu konqueror /mnt". That brought up the "this action needs root privileges" dialog again, but when Konqueror loaded the cd-rom and floppy drive icons had little locks on them and I still could not change them.
I am quite a newbie, but that still sounds very wrong to me.
It was a deliberate mistake?
Anywho, here's the story of the first time I tried to do this. I tried to ignore the thing's warning messages and use KDE, because I don't know what special stuff you have to do to mount a cd burner drive thing on the command line (again, I'm new at this) and KDE got very upset; I'm borderline on saying parts of it didn't work that time as root. I got all confused because the cursor was in the little watch shape, but it didn't appear to be in the middle of doing anything. The drive looked mounted; I tried to copy the files, and Konqueror promptly crashed, only time it's ever crashed for me.
What ended up saving me was: this was all on my laptop, and it holds either a CD or floppy drive but not both at once. So I shut down the computer and restart it with the floppy in. Mandrake recognized my different hardware on boot and gave me a list of options, which I set to what I thought will let me copy the files, and lo and behold, it worked. Of course, by now I've switched the drives again a bunch of times and the settings went back. I think they actually reset to default as soon as I restarted, but I'm not positive.
You could make the case that that was just me being stupid, but if you're going to start putting Linux on everyone's desktop, they aren't going to magically know how to do it properly either. And lots of them are going to want to do it in the GUI. (There are your missing government necessary widgets, just to prove I'm not off topic.) Using CD and floppy drives is something normal people with isolated type of desktop computers do all the time, and figuring this out is going to need to get easier.
In fact, could someone explain to me why you need root privileges to read and write to the CD or floppy? That doesn't make any sense, at least for desktop use.
(Disclaimer: I'm not angry. This is not a troll. I like Linux and I'm just relating a problem I had with it. Which is likely due to me being a blockhead.)
To get to the point. I don't think I'd recommend it to Sally Secretary yet. - How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Training isn't a factor for normal users. Personally, I don't think you understood the problem. Sally Secretary could learn how to use Linux easily with more graphical, user-friendly distro and apps. But whoever posted "Not quite ready" is right, Linux needs a touch-up job first. I think it needs a little more time during which some more people look at it from a "take-this-thing-to-normal-joe's-desktop" point of view. There are some things that ought to be fixed before users with way less computer knowledge use it. For example, in KDE the app - maybe the only app that's ever crashed on me is, of all things, the help function, and it's happened repeatedly. Not only do I not figure out how to do whatever I'm looking up, it's terribly disheartening.
For example, Mandrake's Diskdrake, which is part of the easy installation too ;) I'm new at this, I first installed Linux dual-boot in April, and at that point Diskdrake was the only free (free as in no money) program I could find that could resize NTFS partitions. The bother about it is that it only runs DURING Mandrake's installation procedure. However, people say you can just run Diskdrake, cancel the install, and then install another distro.
There's probably some other program out there by now that does this but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
That's why there are so many distros, isn't it? Everyone has different tastes, so everyone can find one that pretty much fits their needs. Though it does seem that a lot of people use Slackware.
I actually don't use Debian though, I use Mandrake, and though I haven't checked out Gentoo, I find that Mandrake was very, very helpful to my overwhelmed newbie mind. Knowledgeable users are great, but when I'm still struggling to set it up what I really want is a "Please do it all for me!" button.