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Guide Dog Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 8131 Location: MN

Quote:
he kept getting unwanted pornographic popup ads

Porn comes in an unwanted varity now?

Quote:
I have disks for FreeBSD, Linux (Red Hat and SuSE, and Ubuntu), FreeDOS, Mac OSX, various flavours of Windows, and my beloved BeOS, which was probably my favourite of them all.

No debian?!?!?!

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 8:28 am Post subject:

anglachel wrote:
Quote:
he kept getting unwanted pornographic popup ads

Porn comes in an unwanted varity now?

Quote:
I have disks for FreeBSD, Linux (Red Hat and SuSE, and Ubuntu), FreeDOS, Mac OSX, various flavours of Windows, and my beloved BeOS, which was probably my favourite of them all.

No debian?!?!?!

No, I didn't ever do Debian. And I would imagine *someone* out there wants pornographic popups, since there are so many of them out there.

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 10:08 am Post subject:

Good article, Ed;

Always good to hear Linux success stories, and SUSE 9 was a damn fine distro.

Leg Humper Joined: 11 Oct 2003 Posts: 5997

Great article; but and it's a big but, only the tech literate that will probably read it. Now if it was published in a Man or Woman's Magazine then it may catch a few more fishes.

A lot of old folk only use Email. So an old m/c with no hard drive and and Linux on a disk would eliminate all infections.
When a m/c was being converted for them an Email address on Gmail could be created and a sticker on the keyboard with details.

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 2:15 pm Post subject:

Jaymac wrote:
Good article, Ed;

Always good to hear Linux success stories, and SUSE 9 was a damn fine distro.

SuSE 9.2 was a damn fine distro, but SuSE 10.1 was a bit of a let down...

SuSE 10.2 is a damn fine distro though Smile

Something my boss and I have discovered (looking back at SuSE from the 8.1 distro...), the SuSE x.1 distro seems to almost be a "Release Candidate", while X.2 is the actual release. X.1 is usually buggy (not overly though), and has some usability problems. All of which are fixed properly in X.2...

Just my experience Smile

Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 2:25 pm Post subject:

foxinhand wrote:
Great article; but and it's a big but, only the tech literate that will probably read it. Now if it was published in a Man or Woman's Magazine then it may catch a few more fishes.

A lot of old folk only use Email. So an old m/c with no hard drive and and Linux on a disk would eliminate all infections.
When a m/c was being converted for them an Email address on Gmail could be created and a sticker on the keyboard with details.

If someone would be kind enough to Digg the article, etc, maybe a few more would read it.

Your point about "a lot of old folk" is taken. D is 45.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:32 am Post subject:

EdisonRex wrote:
foxinhand wrote:
Great article; but and it's a big but, only the tech literate that will probably read it. Now if it was published in a Man or Woman's Magazine then it may catch a few more fishes.

A lot of old folk only use Email. So an old m/c with no hard drive and and Linux on a disk would eliminate all infections.
When a m/c was being converted for them an Email address on Gmail could be created and a sticker on the keyboard with details.

If someone would be kind enough to Digg the article, etc, maybe a few more would read it.

Your point about "a lot of old folk" is taken. D is 45.

Dugg

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_for_the_Common_Man

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:40 am Post subject:

foxinhand wrote:
Great article; but and it's a big but, only the tech literate that will probably read it. Now if it was published in a Man or Woman's Magazine then it may catch a few more fishes.

A lot of old folk only use Email. So an old m/c with no hard drive and and Linux on a disk would eliminate all infections.
When a m/c was being converted for them an Email address on Gmail could be created and a sticker on the keyboard with details.

One suggestion to the writer is that, one should assume that a reader does not know acronyms. In an article, if one is used the first time, it should be spelled out between parentheses at the first mention. Most users, as uninitiated as this reader to techie talk, don't know how to check them out in Google and might quit early, from lack of understanding. If Digg picks up more readers, it would be sad to have too many who REALLY need to read it, turned off because it is written for a more tech-savvy user... as the writer obviously is.

The article is clear, well articulated in concepts, and full of lots of useful information. One might add, again to the non-techie with not a lot of cash to spend, that the route to set one up is not as difficult as they would imagine it to be (I speak from experience here) and they could be pointed to many articles which make the ease apparent.

Guide Dog Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 8131 Location: MN

fear_nothing wrote:
EdisonRex wrote:
foxinhand wrote:
Great article; but and it's a big but, only the tech literate that will probably read it. Now if it was published in a Man or Woman's Magazine then it may catch a few more fishes.

A lot of old folk only use Email. So an old m/c with no hard drive and and Linux on a disk would eliminate all infections.
When a m/c was being converted for them an Email address on Gmail could be created and a sticker on the keyboard with details.

If someone would be kind enough to Digg the article, etc, maybe a few more would read it.

Your point about "a lot of old folk" is taken. D is 45.

Dugg

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_for_the_Common_Man

Dugg.

And now fear is one of my friends on digg.

edit: maybe next time we should all be around when it is posted so we can digg it up really quickly....

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:26 pm Post subject:

yiayia49 wrote:
foxinhand wrote:
Great article; but and it's a big but, only the tech literate that will probably read it. Now if it was published in a Man or Woman's Magazine then it may catch a few more fishes.

A lot of old folk only use Email. So an old m/c with no hard drive and and Linux on a disk would eliminate all infections.
When a m/c was being converted for them an Email address on Gmail could be created and a sticker on the keyboard with details.

One suggestion to the writer is that, one should assume that a reader does not know acronyms. In an article, if one is used the first time, it should be spelled out between parentheses at the first mention. Most users, as uninitiated as this reader to techie talk, don't know how to check them out in Google and might quit early, from lack of understanding. If Digg picks up more readers, it would be sad to have too many who REALLY need to read it, turned off because it is written for a more tech-savvy user... as the writer obviously is.

The article is clear, well articulated in concepts, and full of lots of useful information. One might add, again to the non-techie with not a lot of cash to spend, that the route to set one up is not as difficult as they would imagine it to be (I speak from experience here) and they could be pointed to many articles which make the ease apparent.

The article was not aimed at the casual user. It was aimed at the technical expert who hasn't thought about installing linux as a way of mitigating support sinks. The audience should know the few acronyms, such as POP, PPP, CRT, KDE, or OSX. Many of those acronyms do not actually use their spelled out version (BeOS and OSX, and BSD are examples) as part of their marketing.

If a casual user finds it interesting but daunting for the presence of a few TLAs, I'll refer to some great articles that are out there already for casual users to install Linux on their own. My experience is that casual users don't want to, and tend to ask for help. But there's a point in there. I'll follow up with some pointers to well written articles for the novice user, since I am really not good at writing articles for novices.

Perhaps I should have made that clear in my article what I was trying to show, that a technical person could install linux for a non technical person, and be rewarded with less support load for it.

I'll remember the tip about expanding TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:18 pm Post subject:

Dugg

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:48 pm Post subject:

Submitted the article at madpenguin.org

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:08 pm Post subject:

Good article. If someone needs to take the time to learn an OS, they might as well learn one that will be safer all around for them.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:14 pm Post subject:

Who wrote the article BTW? - Edison??