Patrick wrote:You have to convince them of the benefits of using OO. It's cheaper, it's Free and supports M$ formats. Extremists say that it shouldn't support closed formats. To them I say we need to wean the addicts off the poison!
Well, if my mum went into a store and bought a computer today and got "lucky" and it had Microsoft Office included, she would hold on to it, because she know how to use PowerPoint fairly well, and the benefits of OpenOffice that you and I value a lot, she don't care about, even the fact that OpenOffice is free doesn't matter to a lot of people, especially to people who're used to Microsoft Office, and uses it at work, they want the stuff they already know about. For example I've tried getting a few of my friends to use OpenOffice, but they just replaced it with a pirated copy of Microsoft Office.
Patrick wrote:Anyone in the corporate world who pushes Outlook should be fired immediately! They're bringing in one of the worst security vulnerabilities into the IT infrastructure.
Hehe well, my entire school uses Exchange servers, the web version of Outlook and Outlook for the teachers. And you don't want to see some of the bigger places here in Denmark, it would make you puke in seconds.
Patrick wrote:I disagree. New formats will be better and people will migrate to them. The challenge is too stop the closed DRM enabled ones and promote the Free and open ones.
Well, people know mp3 so well and it's so widely used, OGG isn't really supported 100% in portable players yet and mp3 is pretty darn close to it, and if they have a huge music collection it's a big pain and they don't see ANY sort of advantage in converting them to OGG, and they would loose a lot of sound quality in that process as well. I'm sure as DRM gets more widely implemented people will start to get annoyed by it, but people who aren't savy, you know the average user of technology out there, just don't care because they don't know how frustrating DRM is, people like my mum who likes to record stuff from the television (She's still using VHS, because she knows how to use it, and she has for at least 15 years) will surely be annoyed by DRM when the move to digital TV gets forced onto the viewers, but still people who aren't annoyed by DRM won't complain about it, and the people that do are so few in numbers that it won't make a difference, I havn't heard of a single complain to the "consumer advocates" (The danish government has a such organization) about iTunes and not being able to put the music on a non-iPod player.
Patrick wrote:If they want to hand M$ $199 every 2 years that's their choice. I choose otherwise. Games is a big weakness for linux. The so-called final frontier.
A lot of the people I know would rather pay M$ than needing to spend the time to learn to use something else, ridiculous right? But it's the sad truth.
A way to solve the gaming issue is to get consoles more wide spread, I think that it will be a long hard road until we see Half-Life 2 and The Sims ported to Linux, because those games are already written for DirectX and I doubt Valve will be porting the game they spend over 20 million dollars developing, to Linux any time soon, because they don't see the market. Also another thing that is about PC gaming is all these little crappy utilities that the gaming addicts use, Ventrilo is one of these shitty voice chat apps they use, not available for Linux.
Patrick wrote:You're still young. I was very pessimistic at your age. Your outlook will improve quite a bit when you find a nice girl!
Yeah I know, I'm just in a bad mood today because I really don't want to give Windows to my aunt on the brand new PC I'm preparing to build for her, because I know she's gonna have problems and she's gonna be shocked at how much she needs to learn about security, and even with Microsoft Office there's a huge learning curve, because she's used to Microsoft Office 7.0, do you know how old that is? I think it's the the predecessor of Office 97!!!!!!!
Patrick wrote:Seriously though, should we just roll over and give up?! Hell no. I don't see M$ being broken up. I see them slowly whittling away in different areas.
Yeah probably, but how do we convince a lot of Windows users to switch to Linux rather than upgrading to Vista? I think the majority will upgrade because they already know Microsoft, even though they probably will get shocked at how much the interface has changed. Also a thing I know that people get annoyed by is the non-integrative nature between KDE and GNOME apps, I hate the fact that Firefox uses the GTK file dialog when I use KDE, the Gimp is also a victim to this. I just hope KDE 4.0 will be like a mesias that will come and clear all this mess up in one way or another.
And by the way, I doubt I will be running into a sweet girl any time soon, I don't know why, but "computer geeks" are seen as non-social, closed to the world outside, boring, and neardy people, and often the direct opposite is the case, if the Linux community wasn't social I doubt the collaboration we have seen would have had so much success.
Patrick wrote:The key is to get linux into education and to teach kids there's a better way. They are the future.
Well how do you do that when the schools already have invested hugely in Microsoft solutions are locked-in to it? My first school spent, a few months before I gradutated, about 10.000 dollars on new machines and about 8000 of that money was spent on Microsoft licenses alone! Another problem here in Denmark is that they don't have the option of buying anything else, Microsoft runs a huge monopoly on a segment of the market that clearly hurts future generations.
