In my MS Windows days every single piece of software I used was pirated. Windows 98, Office, Photoshop, the works. Now that I'm 100% Unix, I still get all my software for free, but legally now. I know that some of you never pirate software and MP3's, but you've got to admit that you know a whole slew of folks that do.
I don't think anyone contests that piracy exists, but even the existence of rampant piracy doesn't prove that software companies lose money due to piracy. Would I have bought a copy of Photoshop had I not been able to get it for free? Hell no! Same with Office 97 -- I wouldn't have paid hundreds of dollars for something when Lotus SmartSuite came free with my computer and worked just fine. The connection between unauthorized use of w4r3z and lost income is really hard to establish.
I don't need to point out that this data would have been much harder to steal if it had been spread out among 200,000,000 separate Oracle servers, like the Oracle folks and key Californian policymakers had recommended.
I don't think that it's satire. Have you ever read a publication called The National Review? It's chock full of crap like this, but it's written in earnest for readers who take it seriously. In this article, there is no obviously deliberate attempt at exaggeration or irony, so I really doubt it's satirical.
I don't really care that much about Star Wars, but I'm very passionately opposed to the radical right wing here in the US. I think that, for better or for worse, there isn't a place for the far right in the contemporary world. I live in one of the most conservative states in the US, and the conservatives have got everything fucked up -- they can't keep the roads paved, they can't keep up the schools, and many state agencies are on the verge of collapse due to lack of funding. A state or a country that doesn't invest in itself or its people has no future. I think that's why Minnesota is so much richer than South Carolina, and why Northern Europe is wealthier (per capita) than the USA. Until you've seen how crappy things are where I am versus how good they are elsewhere, you won't truly appreciate the source of my frustration....
It was heretofore difficult for me to contemplate someone being so pathetic that they took real offense at someone mischaracterizing the actions of fictional persons.
I don't take offense at the author's misinterpretation of the movies -- I don't even like Star Wars that much. What pissed me off is that he downplays the brutality of the Pinochet regime. Furthermore, he seems to be suggesting that it's common knowledge that Pinochet wasn't such a bad guy. I think this is disgusting, even if he means it in jest.
I don't know if he's kidding or not when he called Pinochet a benign dictator, but there really is a view held by some political and economic analysts that what third world countries need is a hardass dictator to whip the government back into shape. I've read articles about the "Pinochet Model." This autocrat, who seized power violently and illegally, actually has fans, at least to an extent. It seems to me that the author is one of them.
Either he's serious, and he thinks that Pinochet is a benign dictator, or he's tasteless enough to joke about murderous dictatorships. Either way, he's a fuckhead.
Steve
I hope he's kidding, but just in case....
on
The Case for the Empire
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's time to put my full karma load to good use....
I'm hoping that this article was written in jest, but in case it isn't, it needs to be addressed. The whole thing is asinine, but here are the most offensive errors.
The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.
The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states.
Episode I makes it clear that it's Palpatine who is behind the bureaucratic mess that plagues the Senate. He's trying to discredit Chancellor Velorum so that he can become Chancellor. Palpatine (as Darth Sidious) admits to this.
"The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."
But it's obvious to everyone in the audience that Palpatine's concern is an act to gain the trust of Amidala. This is just a no-brainer.
What's more, it's not clear that they [the Jedi] should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes..., but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble.... If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard."
I don't understand the problem with this. Qui-Gon explains that they have a screening program that presumably recruits kids from no specific background to become Jedi. So membership in the Jedi order isn't hereditary at all. That one must possess special qualities to be a jedi isn't a problem either. You can't program computers if you aren't good at technical stuff, but that doesn't make us a Royal Swiss Guard.
As for the Jedi being blinded with arrogance, yeah I guess that's true. But if they hadn't fucked up somehow, you wouldn't have had Vader, or the Emporer, and Episodes IV-VI would just be about the Jedi council sitting around picking their noses.
If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.
Assuming that this is true, and Alderaan is armed to the teeth and crawling with terrorists, the indiscriminate slaughter of every man, woman, and child on an entire planet would be an act of evil greater than anything we've ever seen. Much worse than Nazi Germany, Maoist China, and Stalin combined. Of course, there's no reason whatsoever to believe that his claims about Alderaan are true.
Oh yeah, and that remark about Pinochet being a benign dictator. Saying that Pinochet's rule in Chile was acceptable is like saying that a little bit of murder is OK, just not too much. How many innocent people is it OK to murder? 100? 1000? 10,000?
I'm sorry for ranting about something that isn't even a big deal, but this article is so badly written that it's offensive. This conservative fuckhead should go back to the trailer park where he belongs.
If Slashdot trolls go out and populate space, there could be trouble. Imagine when, years from now, radio telescopes start getting bizarre encoded transmissions (Contact style) that say:
1. BSD is dying. 2. Hot grits 3. Petrified Natalie Portman [insert body part here] 4. Rob is gay. 5. So is Jon Katz
It would be ultimate troll. We can't give them that satisfaction.
"Hey, I thought the company was called VA Software...
You've forgotten that it's a world controlling conspiracy. They just call it VA Software to conceal their activities from the nosy mudrakers in the media. After robbing moderation priviledges from more random users (whatever, dude), they'll require a MS Passport to log into an OSDN site. Then comes the military rule, the concentration camps, and the slave labor....
"When I saw BOHF I immediately thought "Bastard Operator from Hell.'"
Bastard Operator Harassment of Finland. For starters, the minimum system requirements call for 64 MB more RAM than you have, regardless of how much RAM you have. And they have a talking paperclip that, rather than trying to help you, tells you to RTFM, which is, of course, written in Russian. This product is exciting news, because in spite of everything, it's still more cost effective and easier to use than MS Office.
If the wrestlers cant get in, then let's try the Actors Guild
HELL NO! Ronald Reagan was bad enough....
On a more serious note, while it's good that Ventura shakes things up politically, he sucks at PR. He pisses off reporters, pisses off voters, pisses of the legislature, the whole works. While honesty is important, keeping up appearances is important too, especially in national and international politics. Ventura's tendency to insult everyone with whom he disagrees would land himself and our country in a shitload of trouble if he were president.
I was a big fan of John McCain when he was running for President. He shakes things up politically, but has enough tact to get work done. Yeah, he's a Republican, but unlike most folks in national politics, he can actually think for himself, so his party affiliation is less important that it would be otherwise.
I was seriously hoping that McCain would beat that fratboy idiot Bush in the Republican primary in 2000. I was pissed when he didn't make it.
BTW, I was just joking when I suggested this. Lately I've been kind of pissed off at the lack of good Sci-Fi on TV and in the movies. Farscape seems OK, and the Star Trek TNG reruns on TNN are cool too, but still....
SELECT * FROM smartass_remarks WHERE name='Simpsons' AND
topic='monorail'
or are you just assuming that all of our smart ass remarks come from The Simpsons?
I was thinking that simpsons would be a flag that is set to true or false depending on whether the smartass remark is a Simpsons reference. But your way is better.
They pulled into Ivers' driveway, knocked on the door and asked to take some pictures, which they posted on a Web site that subsequently crashed because it attracted so many hits.
Scalia and Thomas are extremely conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents. They are likely to do very little to support one's right to privacy.
Warning: this post is seeping with my political views, many of which are controversial. I'm using them as an example, not to try to convert folks or pick a fight.
I'm from Senator Disney's home state. Hollings is a Democrat, so voting against him means voting for a Republican. In other states, this might not be a problem -- there are a lot of moderate Republicans in the Senate that I respect, even if I disagree with some of their opinions. Unfortunately, they aren't on the ballot in South Carolina. Republican politicians in the South are fucking scary. If anyone doubts this, think about Strom Thurmond (segregationist), Jesse Helms (well-known racist), and Trent Lott (pork-barelling thug). I don't know if I can vote for a Southern-style Republican after seeing what damage out-of-control conservativism has done to the South.
In effect, saying "no" to Hollings is saying "yes" to the religious right, "yes" to corporate welfare, "yes" to the war on drugs, "yes" to irresponsible military expenditures (that, unlike much government spending, do nothing to grow the economy), "yes" to wiretapping the Internet, "yes" to mandatory censorware in libraries and schools, and the list goes on. It means saying "no" a woman's right to an abortion, "no" to affirmative action, "no" to spending money on public education, "no" to space research, "no" to any and all liberal social programs. You may not have a problem with all of these issues, but if any one of them is dear to your heart, you've got a real dilemma.
I'm a CS student, and I hope to work in software development one day, but frankly, if I never saw another computer again, or never bought another CD, I could live a happy and rewarding life doing something else. However, I don't think I could, in good conscience, advance a destructive conservative agenda just so I can use Linux instead of Windows, or use a traditional, uncrippled PC. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just saying that I can't, and that many people won't. Technology issues are important, but is it worth abandoning everything else that I believe in just to vote a few (OK, a lot of) crooked Democrats out of office? Sadly, I don't think so.
We have a couple of choices, in my view. We can lobby in the traditional manner -- attempting to purchase influence via campaign donations. This is very expensive, and we'll get spanked by Microsoft and Disney, but maybe it will work if we generate enough public awareness. Barring that, we could just leave. I question whether other countries are still scrambling for computer programmers, but frankly, I'd go to Scandinavia or the Netherlands in a heartbeat if I could.
I hate that this sounds so negative, but I'm pretty demoralized about the whole thing -- it would be interesting to see if someone comes up with a solution.
I used to do some tech support too, and I remember those people. However, what you don't see in tech support are all the thousands of people in the world who may not know much, but can sit down and figure it out, because they don't need to call tech support. I think most computer users fall into this catagory. If this is true, then Linux is certainly a suitable cadidate for the desktop. Here are two examples off the top of my head:
Case 1:
I have a grandmother. She's the stereotypical grandma who doesn't know anything about computers, and calls me on the phone with silly computer questions all the time. However, she was able to use DR-DOS and WordPerfect 5.1 on an old 386 without any problems. Of course, DOS isn't like UNIX, but it's still fairly technical. Back when she had the 386, she had a copy of DOS For Dummies and consulted the book whenever she had a problem. In most cases, that worked fine.
Case 2:
My friend at college, who had never used a computer in his life for anything except MS Word bought an old computer for $25. He got sick of Windows 95 and demanded that I install Linux because he heard it ran faster than Windows on old hardware. So, we put Linux on it, and he's been using it every day ever since. My friend doesn't know the difference between RAM and hard drive space, but he can use FVWM2, Pine, and AbiWord without much trouble. I gave him a copy of O'Reilly's "Running Linux" and I've come by to fix a few hardware-related problems, but he's been basically on his own the whole time, and he likes Linux better than Windows 95.
My Point
Clueless newbies are perfectly capable of running UNIX, especially in corporate environments where the computers are managed by a sysadmin. All the complicated stuff that average users would need to do can be done from graphical utilities like Nautilus or Konqueror. Using Linux in the home may be more annoying than it is worth to Joe Sixpack, but that's just because most i386 UNIX distros are targeted towards corporate customers, rather than home users. Even those products aren't any more complicated than DOS was.
I think the fact that we're computer geeks is irrelevent. We weren't born computer geeks, after all. Everyone reading this post can remember a time when they didn't know anything about computers, but we all managed to learn UNIX. I don't think I'm that much smarter than anyone else is, in fact, I don't have much natural ability in math or science at all. I just sat down and learned how to use it. Anyone else could, if they had a good reason to do so.
That last part is the problem. While I think that Linux offers real advantages over Windows in a corporate or institutional setting (LAN of managed PC's, and so on), Linux isn't any better or worse than Windows or MacOS or BeOS or anything else. Once you can play your MP3's, run office apps, and connect to the Internet, you've done everything a home user needs to do with a computer. Unless Linux does something cool and amazing that Windows can't do, there is no incentive for Joe Sixpack to switch.
At my school (which shall remain nameless), we the students can get MS software for only a small fee: basically the cost of the media. This is due, I'm sure, to Microsoft's academic volume license agreement...and you've got to admit, it's a damn good deal for us students.
At my school (which shall remain nameless), we the students can get MS software totally for free. This is due, I'm sure, to the big-ass w4r3z server run by the l33t h4x0r d00d down the hall. You've got to admit, it's a damn good deal for us students.
Slashdot Mirror
REALLY BAD SECURITY VULNERABILITY EXPOSED
DATE: July 17, 2002
AFFECTED SYSTEMS:
All systems for which Symantec sells products.
DESCRIPTION:
Holy Fucking Shit!! The computer just, like, explodes! It's the end of the world!
WORKAROUND:
Install Norton Anti-Virus. If you already have Norton Antivirus installed, buy another copy and install it. That'll fix it, we promise.
Why, oh why can't I live in Norway?
Steve
Localization and language support are going to be an issue here.
I don't know -- most Norwegians speak English better than we do.
Having said that, KDE at least is pretty well internationalized.
Steve
Everyone knows that the answer to a question appearing in the headline of a Slashdot article almost always "No".
Steve
Confessions of a Reformed W4r3z D00d:
In my MS Windows days every single piece of software I used was pirated. Windows 98, Office, Photoshop, the works. Now that I'm 100% Unix, I still get all my software for free, but legally now. I know that some of you never pirate software and MP3's, but you've got to admit that you know a whole slew of folks that do.
I don't think anyone contests that piracy exists, but even the existence of rampant piracy doesn't prove that software companies lose money due to piracy. Would I have bought a copy of Photoshop had I not been able to get it for free? Hell no! Same with Office 97 -- I wouldn't have paid hundreds of dollars for something when Lotus SmartSuite came free with my computer and worked just fine. The connection between unauthorized use of w4r3z and lost income is really hard to establish.
Steve
With only a little bit of Unix knowledge, you can write Katz articles too!
bash% lynx -dump http://slashdot.org/some_old_katz_article.pl | sed -e "s/post-Columbine/post-9\/11/g" >today\'s_article.txt
Ta-da!
I don't need to point out that this data would have been much harder to steal if it had been spread out among 200,000,000 separate Oracle servers, like the Oracle folks and key Californian policymakers had recommended.
Steve
*Abruptly stops the finger from clicking the link*
Don't worry -- books can't crash.
Steve
I don't think that it's satire. Have you ever read a publication called The National Review? It's chock full of crap like this, but it's written in earnest for readers who take it seriously. In this article, there is no obviously deliberate attempt at exaggeration or irony, so I really doubt it's satirical.
I don't really care that much about Star Wars, but I'm very passionately opposed to the radical right wing here in the US. I think that, for better or for worse, there isn't a place for the far right in the contemporary world. I live in one of the most conservative states in the US, and the conservatives have got everything fucked up -- they can't keep the roads paved, they can't keep up the schools, and many state agencies are on the verge of collapse due to lack of funding. A state or a country that doesn't invest in itself or its people has no future. I think that's why Minnesota is so much richer than South Carolina, and why Northern Europe is wealthier (per capita) than the USA. Until you've seen how crappy things are where I am versus how good they are elsewhere, you won't truly appreciate the source of my frustration....
Steve
It was heretofore difficult for me to contemplate someone being so pathetic that they took real offense at someone mischaracterizing the actions of fictional persons.
I don't take offense at the author's misinterpretation of the movies -- I don't even like Star Wars that much. What pissed me off is that he downplays the brutality of the Pinochet regime. Furthermore, he seems to be suggesting that it's common knowledge that Pinochet wasn't such a bad guy. I think this is disgusting, even if he means it in jest.
I don't know if he's kidding or not when he called Pinochet a benign dictator, but there really is a view held by some political and economic analysts that what third world countries need is a hardass dictator to whip the government back into shape. I've read articles about the "Pinochet Model." This autocrat, who seized power violently and illegally, actually has fans, at least to an extent. It seems to me that the author is one of them.
Either he's serious, and he thinks that Pinochet is a benign dictator, or he's tasteless enough to joke about murderous dictatorships. Either way, he's a fuckhead.
Steve
It's time to put my full karma load to good use....
... If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard."
I'm hoping that this article was written in jest, but in case it isn't, it needs to be addressed. The whole thing is asinine, but here are the most offensive errors.
The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.
The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states.
Episode I makes it clear that it's Palpatine who is behind the bureaucratic mess that plagues the Senate. He's trying to discredit Chancellor Velorum so that he can become Chancellor. Palpatine (as Darth Sidious) admits to this.
"The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."
But it's obvious to everyone in the audience that Palpatine's concern is an act to gain the trust of Amidala. This is just a no-brainer.
What's more, it's not clear that they [the Jedi] should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes..., but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble.
I don't understand the problem with this. Qui-Gon explains that they have a screening program that presumably recruits kids from no specific background to become Jedi. So membership in the Jedi order isn't hereditary at all. That one must possess special qualities to be a jedi isn't a problem either. You can't program computers if you aren't good at technical stuff, but that doesn't make us a Royal Swiss Guard.
As for the Jedi being blinded with arrogance, yeah I guess that's true. But if they hadn't fucked up somehow, you wouldn't have had Vader, or the Emporer, and Episodes IV-VI would just be about the Jedi council sitting around picking their noses.
If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.
Assuming that this is true, and Alderaan is armed to the teeth and crawling with terrorists, the indiscriminate slaughter of every man, woman, and child on an entire planet would be an act of evil greater than anything we've ever seen. Much worse than Nazi Germany, Maoist China, and Stalin combined. Of course, there's no reason whatsoever to believe that his claims about Alderaan are true.
Oh yeah, and that remark about Pinochet being a benign dictator. Saying that Pinochet's rule in Chile was acceptable is like saying that a little bit of murder is OK, just not too much. How many innocent people is it OK to murder? 100? 1000? 10,000?
I'm sorry for ranting about something that isn't even a big deal, but this article is so badly written that it's offensive. This conservative fuckhead should go back to the trailer park where he belongs.
Steve
If Slashdot trolls go out and populate space, there could be trouble. Imagine when, years from now, radio telescopes start getting bizarre encoded transmissions (Contact style) that say:
1. BSD is dying.
2. Hot grits
3. Petrified Natalie Portman [insert body part here]
4. Rob is gay.
5. So is Jon Katz
It would be ultimate troll. We can't give them that satisfaction.
Steve
I would just say that the dog ate all my incriminating paperwork. It worked in grade school.
Steve
"Hey, I thought the company was called VA Software...
You've forgotten that it's a world controlling conspiracy. They just call it VA Software to conceal their activities from the nosy mudrakers in the media. After robbing moderation priviledges from more random users (whatever, dude), they'll require a MS Passport to log into an OSDN site. Then comes the military rule, the concentration camps, and the slave labor....
Steve
"When I saw BOHF I immediately thought "Bastard Operator from Hell.'"
Bastard Operator Harassment of Finland. For starters, the minimum system requirements call for 64 MB more RAM than you have, regardless of how much RAM you have. And they have a talking paperclip that, rather than trying to help you, tells you to RTFM, which is, of course, written in Russian. This product is exciting news, because in spite of everything, it's still more cost effective and easier to use than MS Office.
If the wrestlers cant get in, then let's try the Actors Guild
HELL NO! Ronald Reagan was bad enough....
On a more serious note, while it's good that Ventura shakes things up politically, he sucks at PR. He pisses off reporters, pisses off voters, pisses of the legislature, the whole works. While honesty is important, keeping up appearances is important too, especially in national and international politics. Ventura's tendency to insult everyone with whom he disagrees would land himself and our country in a shitload of trouble if he were president.
I was a big fan of John McCain when he was running for President. He shakes things up politically, but has enough tact to get work done. Yeah, he's a Republican, but unlike most folks in national politics, he can actually think for himself, so his party affiliation is less important that it would be otherwise.
I was seriously hoping that McCain would beat that fratboy idiot Bush in the Republican primary in 2000. I was pissed when he didn't make it.
Steve
BTW, I was just joking when I suggested this. Lately I've been kind of pissed off at the lack of good Sci-Fi on TV and in the movies. Farscape seems OK, and the Star Trek TNG reruns on TNN are cool too, but still....
Steve
Mod me down if you need to, but you've gotta admit the world would be a better place.
Steve
Hmm... I'd use something more like:
SELECT *
FROM smartass_remarks
WHERE name='Simpsons' AND
topic='monorail'
or are you just assuming that all of our smart ass remarks come from The Simpsons?
I was thinking that simpsons would be a flag that is set to true or false depending on whether the smartass remark is a Simpsons reference. But your way is better.
Steve
Let's get this out of the way early:
SELECT *
FROM smartass_remarks
WHERE simpsons='t' AND
topic='monorail'
There.
They pulled into Ivers' driveway, knocked on the door and asked to take some pictures, which they posted on a Web site that subsequently crashed because it attracted so many hits.
Yep, that was us, all right.
Scalia and Thomas are extremely conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents. They are likely to do very little to support one's right to privacy.
Steve
Warning: this post is seeping with my political views, many of which are controversial. I'm using them as an example, not to try to convert folks or pick a fight.
I'm from Senator Disney's home state. Hollings is a Democrat, so voting against him means voting for a Republican. In other states, this might not be a problem -- there are a lot of moderate Republicans in the Senate that I respect, even if I disagree with some of their opinions. Unfortunately, they aren't on the ballot in South Carolina. Republican politicians in the South are fucking scary. If anyone doubts this, think about Strom Thurmond (segregationist), Jesse Helms (well-known racist), and Trent Lott (pork-barelling thug). I don't know if I can vote for a Southern-style Republican after seeing what damage out-of-control conservativism has done to the South.
In effect, saying "no" to Hollings is saying "yes" to the religious right, "yes" to corporate welfare, "yes" to the war on drugs, "yes" to irresponsible military expenditures (that, unlike much government spending, do nothing to grow the economy), "yes" to wiretapping the Internet, "yes" to mandatory censorware in libraries and schools, and the list goes on. It means saying "no" a woman's right to an abortion, "no" to affirmative action, "no" to spending money on public education, "no" to space research, "no" to any and all liberal social programs. You may not have a problem with all of these issues, but if any one of them is dear to your heart, you've got a real dilemma.
I'm a CS student, and I hope to work in software development one day, but frankly, if I never saw another computer again, or never bought another CD, I could live a happy and rewarding life doing something else. However, I don't think I could, in good conscience, advance a destructive conservative agenda just so I can use Linux instead of Windows, or use a traditional, uncrippled PC. I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just saying that I can't, and that many people won't. Technology issues are important, but is it worth abandoning everything else that I believe in just to vote a few (OK, a lot of) crooked Democrats out of office? Sadly, I don't think so.
We have a couple of choices, in my view. We can lobby in the traditional manner -- attempting to purchase influence via campaign donations. This is very expensive, and we'll get spanked by Microsoft and Disney, but maybe it will work if we generate enough public awareness. Barring that, we could just leave. I question whether other countries are still scrambling for computer programmers, but frankly, I'd go to Scandinavia or the Netherlands in a heartbeat if I could.
I hate that this sounds so negative, but I'm pretty demoralized about the whole thing -- it would be interesting to see if someone comes up with a solution.
Steve
I used to do some tech support too, and I remember those people. However, what you don't see in tech support are all the thousands of people in the world who may not know much, but can sit down and figure it out, because they don't need to call tech support. I think most computer users fall into this catagory. If this is true, then Linux is certainly a suitable cadidate for the desktop. Here are two examples off the top of my head:
Case 1:
I have a grandmother. She's the stereotypical grandma who doesn't know anything about computers, and calls me on the phone with silly computer questions all the time. However, she was able to use DR-DOS and WordPerfect 5.1 on an old 386 without any problems. Of course, DOS isn't like UNIX, but it's still fairly technical. Back when she had the 386, she had a copy of DOS For Dummies and consulted the book whenever she had a problem. In most cases, that worked fine.
Case 2:
My friend at college, who had never used a computer in his life for anything except MS Word bought an old computer for $25. He got sick of Windows 95 and demanded that I install Linux because he heard it ran faster than Windows on old hardware. So, we put Linux on it, and he's been using it every day ever since. My friend doesn't know the difference between RAM and hard drive space, but he can use FVWM2, Pine, and AbiWord without much trouble. I gave him a copy of O'Reilly's "Running Linux" and I've come by to fix a few hardware-related problems, but he's been basically on his own the whole time, and he likes Linux better than Windows 95.
My Point
Clueless newbies are perfectly capable of running UNIX, especially in corporate environments where the computers are managed by a sysadmin. All the complicated stuff that average users would need to do can be done from graphical utilities like Nautilus or Konqueror. Using Linux in the home may be more annoying than it is worth to Joe Sixpack, but that's just because most i386 UNIX distros are targeted towards corporate customers, rather than home users. Even those products aren't any more complicated than DOS was.
I think the fact that we're computer geeks is irrelevent. We weren't born computer geeks, after all. Everyone reading this post can remember a time when they didn't know anything about computers, but we all managed to learn UNIX. I don't think I'm that much smarter than anyone else is, in fact, I don't have much natural ability in math or science at all. I just sat down and learned how to use it. Anyone else could, if they had a good reason to do so.
That last part is the problem. While I think that Linux offers real advantages over Windows in a corporate or institutional setting (LAN of managed PC's, and so on), Linux isn't any better or worse than Windows or MacOS or BeOS or anything else. Once you can play your MP3's, run office apps, and connect to the Internet, you've done everything a home user needs to do with a computer. Unless Linux does something cool and amazing that Windows can't do, there is no incentive for Joe Sixpack to switch.
Steve
At my school (which shall remain nameless), we the students can get MS software totally for free. This is due, I'm sure, to the big-ass w4r3z server run by the l33t h4x0r d00d down the hall. You've got to admit, it's a damn good deal for us students.
Only kidding,
Steve