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Telsa Gwynne wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:20090727102453.GC31678@telsa.org.uk" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Ar Llu, Gor 27 2009, 09:17:49 +0100, ysgrifennodd Steve Hill:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
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<pre wrap="">This is something that regularly puzzles me, too, but I am biassed
by not having used it other than feeding things through the spell-
checker at university.
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<pre wrap="">I think it's a "what you're used to" thing - trying something new is hard
and most people don't have the patience / attention span to get over the
initial learning curve.
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
Being serious now, I agree entirely, and I am part of that "most
people". I just came from the opposite direction. At the time I met
Unix, Windows just wasn't around. PCs were clunky and expensive,
and the personal computers at the time tended to be Archimedes or
Amigas. As we progressed from scavenged ancient Cifer boxes to early
Linux versions at home, Windows was starting to dominate, but I never
noticed.
And now I am back at university and the university expects me to use
the Windows machines and I must confess that I have learned the bare
minimum I need to know in order to get my stuff through the spell-
checker. So I am exactly the same.
The Windows email stuff baffles me though, and I can now see how
so many people fall for scams and tricks. On Outlook, I cannot see
the actual email addresses I am sending to, just some personal name
in quote marks. I don't even know if they are in the university or
not. And I can't tell anything about who really sent me a given email.
Perhaps some of the graphical Linux email clients mimic this - I
don't know - but on all the Unix text mailers I have ever seen
since mail(1), you get much more information about where things
are going and where they came from in the first place. So I thought
all mail clients did that, and Outlook was a bit of a shock in
that respect!
Telsa
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<br>
<br>
University shocked me, but in a bad way. The moment Vista came out,
they "upgraded" every student machine in the campus to use Vista.
People's USB sticks wouldn't work, the machines were horribly sluggish,
etc. Goodness knows how much it cost them. Interestingly, they did not
upgrade the staff machines.<br>
<br>
Now Windows 7 is on the horizon, and no doubt the uni will spend
another batch of more money than I've ever seen in my life on upgrading
again. I say upgrade this time properly, as removing Vista and
replacing it with pretty much anything is an upgrade.<br>
<br>
During this time, Fedora has sat on the machines reasonably fine, other
than a few missing bits of software which would have been useful.<br>
<br>
Keeping with the intro - I first started using Linux in about 2005 when
I was seriously curious. After a few weeks of realising it wasn't bad,
I formatted the drive and only installed Suse (9.1 at the time). If
there was an error that had me stumped, I had to fix it, or put up with
it. Shortly after, I jumped between Mandriva, back to Suse, to Mandriva
again, to Fedora 4, then eventually to Ubuntu. A few years pass, and
i'm currently on Windows (thanks to Direct3D based graphics
development). I use Debian on a seperate server machine to host a few
subversion repositories, a typical LAMP server, the household's media
files, and a motion detecting system using a few old webcams and
"motion". The machine's specs are so low that Windows would not be an
option, even if I wanted it to be.<br>
<br>
Anyhow, welcome to the group Michael!<br>
<br>
<br>
(p.s - I looked at another thread on SWLUG's forum listing, and my
reply to ".tar.gz file" seems to be blank? Hopefully this message won't
get the same fate! )<br>
<br>
James<br>
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