"Granny - Just edit your Registry!" Re: hoax or bad taste joke by Redhat's CEO?

[Vince Scimeca]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 16:34, Steve Withers wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 18:05, Justin L Croonenberghs wrote:
> > Why not? He's being honest. Can you honestly imagine your grandma picking
> > up a computer and then finding out she needs to edit her /etc/inittab?
> > 
> > :-)
> 
> If she wants Internet browsing and e-mail, there would be no need for
> her to do that. 
> 
> Would you tell yer Grandma all she needs to do is run 'regedit' and make
> some changes to her registry keys? 
> 
> Or how do you explain she needs to patch new XP system to keep the worm
> viruses away....but she can't connect to the Internet to download the
> patch becasue she will be infected? 
> 
> This is just two situations that are more of a pain than most things I
> do on Linux.  
> 
> There are many more. 

I agree.  I have been a RH user for some time now.  My wife, who would
probably be considered to have average PC knowledge has always been a M$
user.  After getting tired of rebuilding her W2K laptop for who knows
how many times for many various reasons I instead rebuilt her laptop to
RH.  I checked with her to see what apps she needed (browser, email, doc
editor, spreadsheet) and thought this would be a good thing to do. 
Hell, if she didn't like it I could always bring her back to M$.  It has
been several months now that she has been running RH and I have not had
to touch the machine to address any issues since I handed it over to
her...and she uses it on a daily basis.  She has no reason to know
anything about opening a terminal for what she needs to do.  I am not
saying that this is an ideal situation for the masses, but I also don't
think Linux should be looked at as something you need to be a computer
geek to understand.  Luckily in our situation if my wife had an issue
with it she has a computer geek who can take care of it ;-)
-- 
Vince Scimeca - Senior Technology Manager
Jupitermedia Corp.
vscimeca at jupitermedia.com