On 4/19/05, JD Runyan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To simply choose that protecting the users data as the only important > factor, is simply tunnel vision.
Thank you for saying this. Somebody needed to say it. What about Tux Racer??? What about Internet access? What about VLC? Anecdotally, my father runs a computer he bought as a package in 1999. The thing runs Windows 98 and has had one re-install since then. As you can imagine, it runs rather poorly, giving him errors all the time, freezing up, refusing to open programs. Here about a week ago, it finally bit the dust. It gave a "general protection fault" (I think; he's 2000 miles away) and refuses to even start. When he told me about it he said that he was so furious because he had a lot of important data on there and now he was just going to have to throw it away. In fact, he had meant to throw it away the day before I called, but hadn't gotten to it. Sweet Jesus! I said to myself. It so happens that I've been in the process of building him a new computer. It'll be trivial to get his data off of his old hard drive onto this new one. But he didn't understand that until I told him. (In fact, I've told him before, but computers aren't his thing, and he doesn't understand some computer concepts.) If it hadn't been for his having a tech-savvy acquaintance (me) loss of OS would have been *exactly* the same as loss of data. And not everyone has such an acquaintance, *especially* those people who comprise the market Linspire is targeting. -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
