Several things jumped out at me about Mr. (Ms. ? - can't really be
sure, given the way the author is identified) Weston:
* seems to have a prejudice against tech types; used the
possibly derogatory term "geeks" a total of seven times
in the course of the opinion
* follows what I view as the "keep 'em ignorant so we can sell
'em more stuff they don't need, all the while claiming
it's in their best interests" philosophy used so
successfully by Microsoft and typified recently by
Bill Gates' TV ad. I found the paragraph below a
classic example of that approach.
"The normal, none (sic) geek, type of user, doesn't care about
what OS they work on. They are much more concerned with the
applications they run. Indeed, a fair percentage of people
don't even comprehend what an OS is. Microsoft word (sic)
runs on a PC - the idea of another program, the OS, running at
the same time, invisibly, is just to (sic) deep, and they are
not in the business of wanting to learn yet another bit of
technology."
It's been my experience as a teacher that, contrary to
condescending statements like these, users do care
about/want to comprehend. They don't want to be software
engineers, but they do like to have an idea of how the
machine thinks/operates.
* uses a unique brand of logic in drawing conclusions. How
he/she ever came to the point of saying that more use of
Wine would result in less use of Linux, I'm not even going
to try to understand. :0) Even less comprehensible is
the suggestion that Wine is "inside out", so to speak, and
that what's really needed/would be really effective is a
"Linux emulator" for Windows. Now there's a concept, and
one which demonstrates that Weston must not know a great deal
about the natures of the 2 OSes in question. I can't, for
instance, even begin to imagine how such a piece of
software would handle things like the differences in the
structures of the file systems of the 2 OSes, or the
differences in how they handle GUIs (i.e., X on one side
of the fence but not the other ...)
Anyway, I competely agree with what seems to be the growing consensus
at Wine HQ that Weston is full of beans.
Michele Petrovsky
