The "just works" crowd
Submitted by srlinuxx on Wed, 01/14/2009 - 08:08.
One of the things I've been seeing more and more as of late is an attitude of "I just want it to work". Oddly, it's not a new attitude, but as we expand out into new markets, and go after new groups of users, we're starting to encounter people like this more and more.
Part of the reason behind that is, we've already picked all the low hanging fruit from several different trees along the way. We've collected all (or most) of the uber geeks, the sysadmins, and the power users. But now, as we begin to pick up more of the average daily consumer, we're starting to encounter a lot of the "just works" crowd.
These are typically people who don't want to think about what they're doing with a PC, or anything outside of their job. They just want to point, click, and whatever it is they want just happens. Kind of like the whole push button mentality of the Jetsons.
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I fit in that category to some degree.
I spent a lot of time fooling around and tweaking my Linux installation without getting too technical (still never compiled a kernel myself), but when it came time to set up my home computers networked I picked a distribution that was easy to set up, easy to maintain and easy to update. Another nice plus is that the systems could see the server on the network without any tweaking or changes.
My wife fits in the category of not being interested in the computer. She's finally using it more and more because she's the room mom and everybody converses via email. Otherwise the only way to get her to do things on the computer is to show here how SHE would benefit (such as printing business cards or pamphelts for her business, or setting up her website and the number of hits she's gotten, etc.)
Now that I have that up and running I am fooling around with another distribution which may not be considered so easy, but if it fails or fries then it won't mess up the rest of the comptuers on the network which my family has gotten used to.
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Linux means Freedom,
the problem is most users don't know what it is,
or how to use it.
Livecd cloud computing always works ? Why and why not ?
I love livecd(s), with FireFox v1.0 onward. No history, not a single config data stored.
No fragmented data to spoil my computer system!
This fact came to light on the new Chinese netbook with ultra light carried to the extreme. Loongson is paired with 128 mB of drams and 1 gB of Flash card. And it barely works. Firefox does not store web history.
In the end it has the appeal of an embedded device. Turn it on and its on the net. Do some cloud computing and store all the data on the web. Its a system approach of why waste time and money; if you only do cloud computing anyway. Internet gave you much data storage upto 5 gB capacity free. We don't need free open source, we need free access and free data storage in the clouds. Do I sound like reinvented OLPC?
Sounded like I am back from 2009 CES, and all that hoopla, too!