[Sussex] Evesham

[Dominic Clay]

Geof,

Morning... :)

>Unfortunately home users are an uneducated market who fear
>anything they haven't seen before.

I consider myself reasonably educated...

>THey will demand windows XP and will react badly to being offered choice.  

Currently I would *demand* an MS OS on a machine I bought for home use as I
have yet to be convinced that I can get the speed of use (read 'ease of
access to lazy features'), compatability and 'hard day at work today' type
simplicity that I demand from my home system.  I do not care if it can't run
as a cluster, I do not want reliability.  I couldn't give a bugger about
security, My checkbook is in the drawer!  
What I want, is somethin pretty, What I want is wizards, What I want are
messages in bubbles and loads of games that install themselves for me when I
wiggle my mouse at them at them.

Don't get me wrong, I want to be able to get under the surface of a web
server too.  I want a system that I can tinker with, alter, rebuild the
underlying kernel (one day :} ).  But that is what sets us *apart* from the
standard user.  It is not what makes us the same.

AND I can't play Dark age of Camelot on Linux!!!!

>As far as the home market is concerned - it will come once the business
desktop comes around to the idea of LINUX - the whole reason people use
Windows >at home is because they used it at work - prior to the boom in
Windows machines in the workplace (in the age of a relitively few Dos based
machines and >lots of UNIX machines with dumb terminals) the most common
home machines were Amiga's, ST's and Mac's.

Unfortunately a huge proportion of the IT support staff now have grown up
with a GUI environment on their servers.  We all know how many cowboys are
in our industry.  They want the same ease of use from their servers that
they have from their desktop.  It is that simple (IMHO).  Ease of use wins
out.  Ease of learning the system rules the *real* world.

For discussion....

Dominic
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