I thought the problem with the GPS system was that whenever the USA feels like it, they can make it useless for some regions in the world. That would make the EU even more dependent on the USA's sympathy, and whenever we (I am a EU citizen) "aren't with the US" (e.g. the war on Iraq), the USA can "punish" us by rendering most of the navigation equipment less accurate, or completely disable it. And that's not something you want if you want reliable navigation for airplanes, public transport, ships,...
If you really think you still need to use the command line to install packages on Linux, you haven't seen Fedora/RedHat, Mandrake or Suse since a few years, but anyway, I can ask you the opposite questions:
How many Joe Users can correctly install and configure a virusscan and firewall package?
How many Joe Users did install their Windows operating system themselves?
How many Joe Users know what software they need? (I mean, how many of them can go to a (online) shop and just ask the software packet they need without asking the sailes person "i need something to organize my digital pictures into an album")
How many Joe Users are actually able to install a network if installing the nic's and configuration wasn't done by the vendor of the computer
If you have to deal with complete computer n00bs, they need help with everything.
And for the people who are able to do most of the configuring and installations of the computer themselves I see two types:
those who are open to something new and try Linux (most actually like it after a few days working with it, some just cannot get used to it and return to windows),
and those "religiously" sticking with Windows "cause they're used to it, they know it."
The author gives some arguments why Open Source Software cannot be used by the common people. Is she implying our goal is to achief world domination?
Well, I like OSS, I use it all the time, but I see no reason why non-geeks should do so too.
The only really bad thing about proprietary software is that most of it is owned by one company. And that causes problems when it comes to defining standards. But if it wasn't for the proprietary Word, Excell and Windows Media documents: why would we care that 95% of all computer users are using proprietary software? Does it hurt us?
Most open source programmers have no advantage by the number of users. TV stations are being payed according to the number of viewers, OSS isn't. When a programmer uses OSS, and he adds code to the project, then we have win-win situation. But if 100 milion simple users use OSS, we're not getting payed, we're not getting any new code, but only millions of mails with questions that are already answered in the READMEs, FAQs or documentation.
So to me it's not important that everbody uses OSS, the only important thing is that companies and OSS developers can agree on some standards, so that it's possible, and will keep being possible in the future, for users of different software to communicate with each other.
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I thought the problem with the GPS system was that whenever the USA feels like it, they can make it useless for some regions in the world. That would make the EU even more dependent on the USA's sympathy, and whenever we (I am a EU citizen) "aren't with the US" (e.g. the war on Iraq), the USA can "punish" us by rendering most of the navigation equipment less accurate, or completely disable it. And that's not something you want if you want reliable navigation for airplanes, public transport, ships, ...
If you really think you still need to use the command line to install packages on Linux, you haven't seen Fedora/RedHat, Mandrake or Suse since a few years, but anyway, I can ask you the opposite questions:
If you have to deal with complete computer n00bs, they need help with everything.
And for the people who are able to do most of the configuring and installations of the computer themselves I see two types:
I don't think everybody will avoid the traffic jam, some people will think that if all the others avoid that place, there will be no traffic jam.
The author gives some arguments why Open Source Software cannot be used by the common people. Is she implying our goal is to achief world domination?
Well, I like OSS, I use it all the time, but I see no reason why non-geeks should do so too. The only really bad thing about proprietary software is that most of it is owned by one company. And that causes problems when it comes to defining standards. But if it wasn't for the proprietary Word, Excell and Windows Media documents: why would we care that 95% of all computer users are using proprietary software? Does it hurt us? Most open source programmers have no advantage by the number of users. TV stations are being payed according to the number of viewers, OSS isn't. When a programmer uses OSS, and he adds code to the project, then we have win-win situation. But if 100 milion simple users use OSS, we're not getting payed, we're not getting any new code, but only millions of mails with questions that are already answered in the READMEs, FAQs or documentation. So to me it's not important that everbody uses OSS, the only important thing is that companies and OSS developers can agree on some standards, so that it's possible, and will keep being possible in the future, for users of different software to communicate with each other.