I do some volunteering work teaching people how to use the free computers we're giving them. Unless the user has requested them to be blank, the machine they receive runs a linux distro. (Mandrake 9.1 for some mysterious reason, but still...)
Mandrake 9.1!? You so need to get them Ubuntu or Mepis, or at least a recent version of Mandriva. Even then, I'm sure as soon as you go away they'll get the neighbor kid to pirate Windows for them, but you could at least try to give them something modern and useable.
Lol, yeah you're parents should totally use Linux.
If my mom didn't need Windows for work, I'ld totally put Linux on her PC. I gave Linux to my technology-clueless best friend, and she's doing just fine. Linux has really made big stides in usability over the past few years, and I'ld recommend anyone who's clueless about Windows (and thus likely to download massive amounts of malware) to switch to Linux.
Make violating someones computer the same crime as their house. 10,000 computers infected? That's 10,000 counts of trespassing, burglary, or something similar. Why not? The desire is the same, the goals are the same.
The problem with this is that most computers are infected by other infected computers and tracing it back to the orginal malicious person who wrote the virus or worm is near impossible. Even spyware and spam can't just be blamed on the companies whose products are advertised; with that recent click-fraud debacle we now know that companies who thought they were purchasing legitimate Yahoo and other advertising wound up with their ads in spyware and spam. Now, Yahoo is working on cleaning that up, and at least with spyware and spam there's a money trail to follow, but that's not the last we're going to see of legitimate companies winding up in spyware and spam.
You say that blaming a person whose computer gets pwned is Rape Culture, but the flaw in that analogy is that rape victims don't usually go around raping more victims (those that do go to jail) while infected computers certainly do go around infecting more. If you want an analogy, compare it to STDs. Sure, we're sad you got infected, but go clean yourself up and stop infecting everyone else.
So if you used Windows on a daily basis, you would not run a virus scanner or a spyware scanner? You would rely solely on your personal computing prowess to prevent and/or remove all infections? If you say yes, first I'll call bullshit. Then I'll ask how you can expect this kind of tech savvy from your average user.
My husband does this. He uses Firefox exclusively, doesn't download crap like Kazaa and Weatherbug, and somehow he manages not to get much spam (it helps that everyone who emails him is either smart enough to use Firefox and not download crapware or used Linux).
I wouldn't expect average users to be that careful either, which is why I hook up everyone I know who isn't that careful with Linux. A good install of Mepis or Ubuntu and they can do anything they want, without worrying what will happen if they click that link. Unless, of course, they type in their bank account number in that link, in which case Linux and all the anti-crapware programs in the world can't save them.
A former police engineer who specializes in audio analysis, Suzuki says he assumed the woman in the legendary famed Leonardo painting was 168 centimeters (5 foot, 6 inches) tall, giving her a relatively low tone for a woman.
How does being 5'6 make you have a low tone? My best friend is 5'6 and she has a high tone. In fact, our voices are so similar (even though I'm 5'2) that people (even my mom) can't tell the difference between us on the phone. I think this whole concept of height = vocal tone is bullshit.
in both installing windows and linux the only really difficult part is partitioning the drive. Of course, installing windows over windows is easy, you just install over the top.
In Linux installing over another Linux is easy, there's on option for installing over ext partitions. There's also options for installing over the whole hard drive and installing in empty space. These are just simple radio boxes to click on, much simpler than Window's manual partitioning.
Most people installing linux want to dual boot, so they have to resize the windows partition, and put the Linux partition and swap partitions in, it gets confusing for novices who just want to use their computer.
I don't think it's fair to count Linux as harder because some people want to do something harder in Linux. Try resizing your Linux partition when installing Windows. Can't, can you?
Also, while I learned how to manually partition for Linux in class, I've never actually needed to do it outside of class. A Linux newbie isn't going to bother with swap partitions and all that, so once they get past resizing the Windows partition if need be they'd just click "install in empty space" and they'd be good.
on the post install, the main problem is in linux if something doesn't work out of the box, it likely is hardware that is simply not supported and you won't be able to get working. At least in windows if something doesn't work out of the box it came with a CD to get it working.
The only thing I've ever had not work right away in Linux was my wifi card, but it was simple enough to get it up and running. I'd certainly rather try Linux on a random computer than put Windows on and resign myself to days of driver searching. I've had the fun catch-22 of not having Windows drivers for my ethernet card. The drivers are on the internet, but I can't get on the internet without them. I've also had hardware that the manufacturer stopped making drivers for so they became large paper weights under Windows, but now work just fine under Linux.
In the end windows is easier to install simply because the brand new Dell computer Joe User bought already has it there
Joe User could buy a Linspire computer and that would be just as easy, and cheaper, too.
While certain distros like Ubuntu and Debian have a proven apt-get package manager, not all are so easy. Try getting someone who pretty much just surfs the internet, types up documents etc. to be able to consistantly be able to configure, make, build the programs in Linux. Its much easier to simply click on setup.exe which for all the good/bad, is much simpler for the average user.
Yes, Ubuntu and Debian and others have good package managing, so why would you not direct newbies to them? Why would you get them a distro where they have to configure, make, and build programs when they could just click on programs in a nice gui package manager? My best friend doesn't have a clue how to bring up a CLI, yet she uses Linux just fine to surf the internet, type up documents, etc. How? Because I gave her Mepis, instead of trying to teach her some complicated distro.
Mplayer in windows is exactly as it is in Linux: plays (almost) everything hassle-free. Of course, it requires that you not wet yourself every time you see a CLI.
Mplayer's my favorite media player, and I never even knew until now that you could use it with the CLI. I don't think the CLI is as much of a requirement as you think.
If Bob doesn't know enough to try to figure out what he's downloading, then why doesn't he go to MicroCenter or Koobox.com or where ever and buy a Lispire box?
And which one is sequential instead of concurrent? I've done it on both Windows and Gnome, and they're both concurrent. Winkey [pause] R on my computer highlights Remote Desktop Connection.
Second, I find nothing more intuitive or easier about GNOME or KDE. They are more customizable, sure, but what percentage of users have the desire to customize the interfaces to the level at which they would have an appreciable amount of increased usability?
Unless the point here is simply that Windows sucks and GNOME r0xorz, I don't get it.
Well, I personally like Gnome better, but that wasn't the point. The point was originally that there's dumb windows users and the orginal poster finds them annoying. It had nothing to do with Linux at all, which yes, makes it off-topic, but it still didn't. Get the chip off your shoulder about Linux off, no one's taking away your precious Windows.
There's a big difference in usability between the "old school" Linuxes (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc) and the "new" Linuxes (Ubuntu, Mepis, PCLinuxOS). I took classes in college on Red Hat, yet I couldn't do shit on it or Mandrake for home use because it was too hard for me. Yet I tried Ubuntu, and I had it set up within an afternoon and it was my main OS after that. I find Ubuntu easier and faster to use than Windows, even though I've only used Ubuntu since this past summer and I've used Windows since 3.1.
But, how would an average user know to use Mepis over Ubuntu? The distro list is huge!
That is a problem. I guess the only thing is just to get the word out about the new user-friendly distros. Whenever any non-techy asks me about Linux, I always direct them to Mepis, or if they're my friend I'll configure Ubuntu for them (a well-configured Ubuntu is the greatest thing IMHO). There's still so many people though who don't know about the newer distros though that it's frustating.:(
Except one shouldn't have to research anything to do basic things in an operating system.
But shouldn't one research the differences in operating systems and choose one that fits their needs instead of selecting one at random? To use the stupid car analogy, if you were buying a car would you pick up the first one the car salesman showed you and then bitch that it's a two-seater and you have three kids? No, you would take stock of your needs (space for 3 kids | multimedia capabilities) and then pick one that matches that (van | Mepis) instead of one that doesn't (sports car | Fedora Core).
And if you don't even want to do that, then why don't you just buy a KooBox or something and have Linux already set up instead of picking some random distro and then complaining about it? What part of downloading a 5-disk operating system to manually install on your computer seemed user-friendly?
In summary, if you want user-friendly Linux then get user-friendly Linux.
The extensions are starting to get more useful than Firefox itself. There's your grocery-list generator, your calendar, your birthdays reminder, your gmail checker and everything else imaginable. I think the Mozilla team is going to keep cutting features and options to spur more extensions until finally someone makes a web browsing extension and then no more work for Mozilla team!
Yep, I use linux for PHP/Apache/mysql developments. I also write some shell scripts. All of this is under Gentoo. When it comes to media however, I'm lost. I can't burn a CD/DVD, I can't wathch video, hell, I've never even gotten the audio to work. I'm not to concered though as I use the machine for development only. Back to the windows machine for the multimedia frills.
Gentoo isn't a real user-friendly distro. You should try Mepis, or, if you like Gnome, Ubuntu + EasyUbuntu. Both will give you the media you want and CD/DVD burning with no extra tweaking (though I prefer GnomeBaker over Ubuntu's default, but you can just find that in Synaptic).
Windows: Window key, r, notepad, enter.
GNOME: Alt+F2, gedit, enter
KDE: Alt+F2, kate, enter
I fail to see any real difference, except that I would rather press two keys sequentially than concurrently. At any rate, his remark just sounded asinine.
First of all, don't you have to press the buttons concurrently for both the Linux and Windows ways?
Second of all, I don't think he was trying to say that either Linux or Windows is harder/easier, but that Windows users who don't know shortcut keys and instead flounder through menu after menu are annoying.
As for how it works, theoretically it should just send "Linux" through Google, and that's what it does with my install here. If you were to clear the "Location" bar, middle click in there, and press enter, exactly the same process should occur, which may show why it did that. Perhaps some extra text got highlighted (thus copied into the copy/paste buffer).
Actually, I tried it on my work computer which runs Windows, so that might have explained some of the wierdness. I'll try it again when I'm home.
It seems like it would be useful, but I'm so used to middle clicking to close tabs that I'm not sure if I could get used to it. I'll mess around with it though, thanks for telling me about it.
If you want media codecs, get a distro with media codecs. There's Mepis, Kanotix, PCLinuxOS, and probably some other ones. To over-use the car analogy, you wouldn't buy a manual-transmission Toyota and then complain that it's harder to use than your old automatic Ford. Don't do the same with Linux.
I don't know about your specific video streaming problems, but I know Mepis (and some other distros) play DVD, mp3, etc, right "out of the box". Maybe you should try the video streaming site with a Mepis live cd instead of manually configuring things?
Joe User does a tiny bit of research on the difference between distros, and installs Mepis instead. His mp3s play, his DVDs play, his wireless works. But no, this story is too boring for Slashdot! So he quickly goes and installs Slackware in search of some difficulties to rant about.
Simply put, the issue is not one of how much administration time people are willing to put in; its about the fact that under windows, they've forgotten about the administration tasks they've either a) already done or b) done so many times on new machines that they just don't notice it and its just become part of the routine for them. It's about not wanting to learn how to do it differently when they already know how to make it work one way. It's back to the original premise as to WHY users don't want to switch from windows to *nix--its not that the system is harder; its just different.
I guess they must forget. I download a lot of different videos and stuff, and back when I used Windows, it seemed like every other one I had to find new codecs and sometimes a new player (divx, realplayer, quicktime, upgrade windows media, argh!). Also, for some reason I couldn't get all my videos to play in one player, they all had a different player that they would work best with (and usually wouldn't work with the others at all). Contrast that to Mepis which came with all the codecs and played all my videos just fine in Kaffeine with *no configuring* whatsoever. Even Ubuntu (a completely free-as-in-speech distro that distains all proprietaryness) just took a quick run of EasyUbuntu. Anyone who says that media is easier to play in Windows obviously doesn't download that much media.
That's because the Ubuntu FF maintainers change the default setting. Download a stock Linux FF build, extract it into ~/, then run it and see.
I did have a stock Linux FF build, from whenever 1.5 came out until I upgraded to Dapper a couple weeks ago (Ubuntu takes forever to update its FF, the stable version (Breezy) still has 1.0.7) and I've always used middle click to close tabs.
Alternatively, open up about:config, and set "middlemouse.contentLoadURL" to true.
I just tried that, and it's really wierd. I highlight "Linux" and middle click on the tab, and the last tab goes to a Ubuntu forums thread on Firefox. Is it sending my whole post into google or something instead of the word I highlighted? How is it supposed to work? I see why it was turned off by default, but it seems like it could be useful if I understood it.
Slashdot Mirror
I do some volunteering work teaching people how to use the free computers we're giving them. Unless the user has requested them to be blank, the machine they receive runs a linux distro. (Mandrake 9.1 for some mysterious reason, but still...)
Mandrake 9.1!? You so need to get them Ubuntu or Mepis, or at least a recent version of Mandriva. Even then, I'm sure as soon as you go away they'll get the neighbor kid to pirate Windows for them, but you could at least try to give them something modern and useable.
Lol, yeah you're parents should totally use Linux.
If my mom didn't need Windows for work, I'ld totally put Linux on her PC. I gave Linux to my technology-clueless best friend, and she's doing just fine. Linux has really made big stides in usability over the past few years, and I'ld recommend anyone who's clueless about Windows (and thus likely to download massive amounts of malware) to switch to Linux.
Make violating someones computer the same crime as their house. 10,000 computers infected? That's 10,000 counts of trespassing, burglary, or something similar. Why not? The desire is the same, the goals are the same.
The problem with this is that most computers are infected by other infected computers and tracing it back to the orginal malicious person who wrote the virus or worm is near impossible. Even spyware and spam can't just be blamed on the companies whose products are advertised; with that recent click-fraud debacle we now know that companies who thought they were purchasing legitimate Yahoo and other advertising wound up with their ads in spyware and spam. Now, Yahoo is working on cleaning that up, and at least with spyware and spam there's a money trail to follow, but that's not the last we're going to see of legitimate companies winding up in spyware and spam.
You say that blaming a person whose computer gets pwned is Rape Culture, but the flaw in that analogy is that rape victims don't usually go around raping more victims (those that do go to jail) while infected computers certainly do go around infecting more. If you want an analogy, compare it to STDs. Sure, we're sad you got infected, but go clean yourself up and stop infecting everyone else.
So if you used Windows on a daily basis, you would not run a virus scanner or a spyware scanner? You would rely solely on your personal computing prowess to prevent and/or remove all infections? If you say yes, first I'll call bullshit. Then I'll ask how you can expect this kind of tech savvy from your average user.
My husband does this. He uses Firefox exclusively, doesn't download crap like Kazaa and Weatherbug, and somehow he manages not to get much spam (it helps that everyone who emails him is either smart enough to use Firefox and not download crapware or used Linux).
I wouldn't expect average users to be that careful either, which is why I hook up everyone I know who isn't that careful with Linux. A good install of Mepis or Ubuntu and they can do anything they want, without worrying what will happen if they click that link. Unless, of course, they type in their bank account number in that link, in which case Linux and all the anti-crapware programs in the world can't save them.
A former police engineer who specializes in audio analysis, Suzuki says he assumed the woman in the legendary famed Leonardo painting was 168 centimeters (5 foot, 6 inches) tall, giving her a relatively low tone for a woman.
How does being 5'6 make you have a low tone? My best friend is 5'6 and she has a high tone. In fact, our voices are so similar (even though I'm 5'2) that people (even my mom) can't tell the difference between us on the phone. I think this whole concept of height = vocal tone is bullshit.
in both installing windows and linux the only really difficult part is partitioning the drive. Of course, installing windows over windows is easy, you just install over the top.
In Linux installing over another Linux is easy, there's on option for installing over ext partitions. There's also options for installing over the whole hard drive and installing in empty space. These are just simple radio boxes to click on, much simpler than Window's manual partitioning. Most people installing linux want to dual boot, so they have to resize the windows partition, and put the Linux partition and swap partitions in, it gets confusing for novices who just want to use their computer.
I don't think it's fair to count Linux as harder because some people want to do something harder in Linux. Try resizing your Linux partition when installing Windows. Can't, can you?
Also, while I learned how to manually partition for Linux in class, I've never actually needed to do it outside of class. A Linux newbie isn't going to bother with swap partitions and all that, so once they get past resizing the Windows partition if need be they'd just click "install in empty space" and they'd be good.
on the post install, the main problem is in linux if something doesn't work out of the box, it likely is hardware that is simply not supported and you won't be able to get working. At least in windows if something doesn't work out of the box it came with a CD to get it working.
The only thing I've ever had not work right away in Linux was my wifi card, but it was simple enough to get it up and running. I'd certainly rather try Linux on a random computer than put Windows on and resign myself to days of driver searching. I've had the fun catch-22 of not having Windows drivers for my ethernet card. The drivers are on the internet, but I can't get on the internet without them. I've also had hardware that the manufacturer stopped making drivers for so they became large paper weights under Windows, but now work just fine under Linux.
In the end windows is easier to install simply because the brand new Dell computer Joe User bought already has it there
Joe User could buy a Linspire computer and that would be just as easy, and cheaper, too.
While certain distros like Ubuntu and Debian have a proven apt-get package manager, not all are so easy. Try getting someone who pretty much just surfs the internet, types up documents etc. to be able to consistantly be able to configure, make, build the programs in Linux. Its much easier to simply click on setup.exe which for all the good/bad, is much simpler for the average user.
Yes, Ubuntu and Debian and others have good package managing, so why would you not direct newbies to them? Why would you get them a distro where they have to configure, make, and build programs when they could just click on programs in a nice gui package manager? My best friend doesn't have a clue how to bring up a CLI, yet she uses Linux just fine to surf the internet, type up documents, etc. How? Because I gave her Mepis, instead of trying to teach her some complicated distro.
Mplayer in windows is exactly as it is in Linux: plays (almost) everything hassle-free. Of course, it requires that you not wet yourself every time you see a CLI.
Mplayer's my favorite media player, and I never even knew until now that you could use it with the CLI. I don't think the CLI is as much of a requirement as you think.
Yeah, but does Bob know that? That was my point.
If Bob doesn't know enough to try to figure out what he's downloading, then why doesn't he go to MicroCenter or Koobox.com or where ever and buy a Lispire box?
First, no.
And which one is sequential instead of concurrent? I've done it on both Windows and Gnome, and they're both concurrent. Winkey [pause] R on my computer highlights Remote Desktop Connection.
Second, I find nothing more intuitive or easier about GNOME or KDE. They are more customizable, sure, but what percentage of users have the desire to customize the interfaces to the level at which they would have an appreciable amount of increased usability? Unless the point here is simply that Windows sucks and GNOME r0xorz, I don't get it.
Well, I personally like Gnome better, but that wasn't the point. The point was originally that there's dumb windows users and the orginal poster finds them annoying. It had nothing to do with Linux at all, which yes, makes it off-topic, but it still didn't. Get the chip off your shoulder about Linux off, no one's taking away your precious Windows.
There's a big difference in usability between the "old school" Linuxes (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc) and the "new" Linuxes (Ubuntu, Mepis, PCLinuxOS). I took classes in college on Red Hat, yet I couldn't do shit on it or Mandrake for home use because it was too hard for me. Yet I tried Ubuntu, and I had it set up within an afternoon and it was my main OS after that. I find Ubuntu easier and faster to use than Windows, even though I've only used Ubuntu since this past summer and I've used Windows since 3.1.
:(
But, how would an average user know to use Mepis over Ubuntu? The distro list is huge!
That is a problem. I guess the only thing is just to get the word out about the new user-friendly distros. Whenever any non-techy asks me about Linux, I always direct them to Mepis, or if they're my friend I'll configure Ubuntu for them (a well-configured Ubuntu is the greatest thing IMHO). There's still so many people though who don't know about the newer distros though that it's frustating.
Except one shouldn't have to research anything to do basic things in an operating system.
But shouldn't one research the differences in operating systems and choose one that fits their needs instead of selecting one at random? To use the stupid car analogy, if you were buying a car would you pick up the first one the car salesman showed you and then bitch that it's a two-seater and you have three kids? No, you would take stock of your needs (space for 3 kids | multimedia capabilities) and then pick one that matches that (van | Mepis) instead of one that doesn't (sports car | Fedora Core).
And if you don't even want to do that, then why don't you just buy a KooBox or something and have Linux already set up instead of picking some random distro and then complaining about it? What part of downloading a 5-disk operating system to manually install on your computer seemed user-friendly?
In summary, if you want user-friendly Linux then get user-friendly Linux.
The extensions are starting to get more useful than Firefox itself. There's your grocery-list generator, your calendar, your birthdays reminder, your gmail checker and everything else imaginable. I think the Mozilla team is going to keep cutting features and options to spur more extensions until finally someone makes a web browsing extension and then no more work for Mozilla team!
Yep, I use linux for PHP/Apache/mysql developments. I also write some shell scripts. All of this is under Gentoo. When it comes to media however, I'm lost. I can't burn a CD/DVD, I can't wathch video, hell, I've never even gotten the audio to work. I'm not to concered though as I use the machine for development only. Back to the windows machine for the multimedia frills.
Gentoo isn't a real user-friendly distro. You should try Mepis, or, if you like Gnome, Ubuntu + EasyUbuntu. Both will give you the media you want and CD/DVD burning with no extra tweaking (though I prefer GnomeBaker over Ubuntu's default, but you can just find that in Synaptic).
Windows: Window key, r, notepad, enter. GNOME: Alt+F2, gedit, enter KDE: Alt+F2, kate, enter
I fail to see any real difference, except that I would rather press two keys sequentially than concurrently. At any rate, his remark just sounded asinine.
First of all, don't you have to press the buttons concurrently for both the Linux and Windows ways?
Second of all, I don't think he was trying to say that either Linux or Windows is harder/easier, but that Windows users who don't know shortcut keys and instead flounder through menu after menu are annoying.
As for how it works, theoretically it should just send "Linux" through Google, and that's what it does with my install here. If you were to clear the "Location" bar, middle click in there, and press enter, exactly the same process should occur, which may show why it did that. Perhaps some extra text got highlighted (thus copied into the copy/paste buffer).
Actually, I tried it on my work computer which runs Windows, so that might have explained some of the wierdness. I'll try it again when I'm home.
It seems like it would be useful, but I'm so used to middle clicking to close tabs that I'm not sure if I could get used to it. I'll mess around with it though, thanks for telling me about it.
You know professional programmers and administrators for Windows who can't find Notepad?
I'm sure what he means is that they find it eventually, while he's impatient as he could open it with a few keyboard shortcuts.
winkey-R notepad
:)
Never heard it called "winkey" before, but thank's for the shortcut tip!
If you want media codecs, get a distro with media codecs. There's Mepis, Kanotix, PCLinuxOS, and probably some other ones. To over-use the car analogy, you wouldn't buy a manual-transmission Toyota and then complain that it's harder to use than your old automatic Ford. Don't do the same with Linux.
People who don't want to use the command line should get Mepis instead of Ubuntu.
That said, to install proprietary stuff on Ubuntu involves 1) Download EasyUbuntu 2) Click some checkboxes.
Either research more about Linux, or find a friend to help you, but don't post that things are so hard when they're not.
I don't know about your specific video streaming problems, but I know Mepis (and some other distros) play DVD, mp3, etc, right "out of the box". Maybe you should try the video streaming site with a Mepis live cd instead of manually configuring things?
Alternative:
Joe User does a tiny bit of research on the difference between distros, and installs Mepis instead. His mp3s play, his DVDs play, his wireless works. But no, this story is too boring for Slashdot! So he quickly goes and installs Slackware in search of some difficulties to rant about.
There's no distro of Linux I know of that plays DVDs and MP3s out of the box, simply due to the licensing issues that Windows has covered.
Mepis and PCLinuxOS do, and I'm sure there's others.
Simply put, the issue is not one of how much administration time people are willing to put in; its about the fact that under windows, they've forgotten about the administration tasks they've either a) already done or b) done so many times on new machines that they just don't notice it and its just become part of the routine for them. It's about not wanting to learn how to do it differently when they already know how to make it work one way. It's back to the original premise as to WHY users don't want to switch from windows to *nix--its not that the system is harder; its just different.
I guess they must forget. I download a lot of different videos and stuff, and back when I used Windows, it seemed like every other one I had to find new codecs and sometimes a new player (divx, realplayer, quicktime, upgrade windows media, argh!). Also, for some reason I couldn't get all my videos to play in one player, they all had a different player that they would work best with (and usually wouldn't work with the others at all). Contrast that to Mepis which came with all the codecs and played all my videos just fine in Kaffeine with *no configuring* whatsoever. Even Ubuntu (a completely free-as-in-speech distro that distains all proprietaryness) just took a quick run of EasyUbuntu. Anyone who says that media is easier to play in Windows obviously doesn't download that much media.
That's because the Ubuntu FF maintainers change the default setting. Download a stock Linux FF build, extract it into ~/, then run it and see.
I did have a stock Linux FF build, from whenever 1.5 came out until I upgraded to Dapper a couple weeks ago (Ubuntu takes forever to update its FF, the stable version (Breezy) still has 1.0.7) and I've always used middle click to close tabs.
Alternatively, open up about:config, and set "middlemouse.contentLoadURL" to true.
I just tried that, and it's really wierd. I highlight "Linux" and middle click on the tab, and the last tab goes to a Ubuntu forums thread on Firefox. Is it sending my whole post into google or something instead of the word I highlighted? How is it supposed to work? I see why it was turned off by default, but it seems like it could be useful if I understood it.