[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: OpenSource articles glore...

[Andrew Brown]

I had the same experience with a friend of mine in ATL. He had over 400
pieces of spyware picked up by a free package I found online. Again he
was reluctant to use anything but IE until I showed him all the garbage
he had and how much his system sped up without all those programs
running in the background. The reluctance is due to ignorance and that
is what M$ is counting on... unfortunately for him the press is getting
out. You can see the panic in the rounds of press that M$ is sending
back. The flashback is that it puts Firefox again in the headlines.
Funny how the browser seems to be the battlefront again... Just when ya
thought it was over.

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 22:25 -0600, Terry wrote:
> > The Firefox Explosion
> > It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new
> > browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your
> > back, Bill Gates.)
> > http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/firefox.html?pg=1&topic=firefox&topic_set=
> 
> After reading the above article, I can't help but think;  the
> OpenSource community is doing a great deal for MS users, just with
> this one project, or two I guess, Firefox and Thunderbird.
> 
> I dropped by a MS user friend's house just yesterday, (win98), spent
> about 2 hours cleaning up their computer using spybot and ad-aware,
> and then I installed Firefox and Thunderbird so that they can keep it
> clean.  They were reluctant at first, (had only used IE and OE, never
> anything else), thought it'd be too hard to learn to use anything
> else, and couldn't even really grasp the terms "Web Browser" and "Mail
> Client".
> 
> I got 'em both installed rather quickly, (as compared to how long it
> took to dredge out all the spyware), and when I got done, they were 
> thrilled!  I showed them how popup blocking worked, tabbed browsing,
> the google search bar, etc.
> 
> And Thunderbird just picks up all the configurations and mail cache
> and mail directories and address book and connection and login
> settings from OE, and they were just amazed.  In just minutes they had
> a whole fresh new way to access and communicate over the Internet.
> 
> I was a hero! I'd preformed a minor miracle on their computer, and all
> I did was  to delete a whole bunch of spyware and install two
> OpenSource applications on their computer.
> 
> And one difficult and amazing part was that I had trouble even
> explaining those two terms. I guess if you've only used one web
> browser in your life, you have no use or knowledge of a term like "Web
> Browser", same with having only used one mail client. No one's ever
> defined either of those terms for them so they just couldn't grasp
> either of them at first. Even though surely they've heard the words,
> they just didn't know what they meant.
> 
> I gotta tell you, they were really happy when I left.  They were about
> ready to buy a new computer, now they're just happy as a couple of
> little clams.
> 
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-- 
Andrew Brown <dutch_fedora at earthlink.net>