Re: Getting wildly off-topic (Was: Re: The future of gnome-pim - an d Balsa, too?)

[<mads randstoft tellabs com>]

Hello!

> I do not find classifying people into stupid and smart is at all
> helpful here. You are not talking about "stupid" people. You are
> talking about bright people who happen to know little about
> computers. If you want people to change, you must not assume
> they have not yet done so "because they are stupid". People do not
> like being called stupid. People do not like being treated as
> though they are stupid. And they will resent it. Rightly. 

I call people stupid because they cast off alternatives simply because they are
alternatives and not what they are using now... In cars as well as computers,
food, friends, agricultural products... (I guess you get the point :-)

I am not acting as a sales person in this forum, and hence do call people
stupid if they are so :-)

Anyway, I do not assume that everyone using outlook (or windoze for that
matter) are stupid. Most of them needs to told of the alternatives to be aware
that they even exists. Those I call stupid are the people that even though
knowing alternatives exists deny trying them, because they are not Microsoft
(or whatever) I used to be such a person (Using only my Amiga, not wanting to
change) I have changed, first being forced to use windoze, and then finding a
better alternative in Linux, I have since that used Irix, BeOS and MacOS but
for now I'm sticking with Linux, as the better alternative for my working...

People that stick with windoze, simply because "everyone" else does that are
stupid... To put it short: "100.000.000.000 flies can't be wrong. Eat shit!"

(Please redirect flames on the above to my account or /dev/null, not the
mailing list!)

> I know _plenty_ of people who think Linux is cool because their friends
> told them so. How do you think Linux awareness spread? How is that in
> any way different from the way you say people develop their beliefs
> about Windows? 

I recent people saying that something is good/cool because they are told so.
You need to try it out for yourself, to see if it does what you need... (In
most cases that is true... Somethings you don't have to try to tell they suck,
but you at least need to think about them anyway)

> I don't quite follow what you're saying here. Online updates? You
> mean pages refreshing? 

Well... He was looking at an online chat board, that work via some background
script, so that all you see as a user is html files, with newer timestamps as
people write something...

At home with his IE browser, it took several seconds of "grey screen" when he
hit refresh before it was finnished drawing the page and he could see wheter
someone had written something on the board.

In Mozilla it was not noticable when it did draw the screen after he hit
refresh, so he though (used to his windoze equivalent) that something was wrong
and cleared the cache, thinking that mozilla did not check timestamps and thus
didn't update... 

So he blamed Mozilla and Linux for being unsuable... Not willing to wait a few
more seconds, before someone actually replied to his message...

The point is if we "emulated" IE behavior, we needed to put a grey screen and
some sleep() commands into the browser, when someone hit "refresh" on a html
file that has the same timestamp in the cache as on the server, to emulate the
slower html layout engine in IE (Or their slower cache compare, or whatever
made it so slow) to make him use Mozilla and Linux... Now that would not be an
optimal solution for the rest of us, so therefor we do not want to do that... I
don't want an email client the emulate outlook either because outlook is crap..
as is to be said for alot of the rest of windoze and M$ aplications...

My general point to the discussion is that I at least don't want apps that look
 and feel like windoze apps on Linux... If I wanted those apps, I would be
using windoze instead.

It is clear that we need a bigger userbase on Linux (and Gnome) to get some of
the big companies to release software for Linux, but we should not get that
userbase by making something that is as bad as windoze... we have KDE for that
IMHO.

- Mads "Mazzachre" Randstoft