to be fair ie6 still has a huge marketshare and most people don’t know about the huge security improvements in vista/7. but its not MS’s fault that average users are morons.

< 1%.

They even baked a cake for it.

Keep up with the important tech stuff, kid.

And incidentally, who are you to call the “average use” a moron?

Check that Evil Step-Mother mirror out, kid. It’s probably lying to you.

puhlease. I work in a shop and see ie6 machines all the time. I am sorry that it offends your sensebilities to call people morons who can’t right click or find the windows key.
I fully understand that normal people use computers as tools and don’t care about technical mumbo jumbo. I don’t care if my bike used titanium or steel as long as it works.

< 1%.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16408850

puhlease.

Have you considered a less intellectually taxing occupation?

Sigh. Also “sensibilities” rather than “sensebilities” (I assume you are in possession of a spell-checker, or at the very least understand the import of a wavy red line in this particular comment box).

Also, I was not calling out “normal people” as “average users [who] are morons.”

You were.

Not only are you incapable of doing your job on a purely technical level, but apparently you don’t actually like your customers, either.

Remind me again why it’s worth employing you, other than in a Linux shop? (They don’t care about either technical or customer facing skills in a Linux shop, or so I’m told.)

i like my customers. the guy who was using ie6 is a terrific dude.

IE6’s marketshare is only huge when compared to desktop Linux marketshare.

@Admin:

Not true. Both are equally subject to MarginOfError™.

Stand up for yourself, you Canadian wimp!

Are you a MacFag™ or a WindowsFanboy™?

Goats or Sheep. The Lord is calling.

@garegin:

Funny how the “terrific dudes” are always the “average user morons,” isn’t it?

I pity da fools.

You might want to do the terrific dude a favour, though, and gently suggest that he upgrades to IE8. (I’m assuming that he’s not quite terrific enough to be on Vista or Windows 7 yet.)

He will whatever you for it. I believe that is the dude-speak for “be quite grateful, all things considered.” I am open to correction on this point.

It was about time we got a TM for this. I can’t believe loons still quote BSODs and IE6, and if you go deep into the jungle of freetardia (aka slashdot comments) you may encounter semi-feral believers of the Great Holy GNU, saying something about “stiil based on DOS” and “how Blaster proved Windoze is inherently insecure”, apparently while being in a state of ecstacy.

Of course, when it’s about Linux, it’s your fault for not having the latest version installed. What? The latest version broke your sound? Disregard that you don’t need the latest version.

@Kurkos:

I’m open to other related TMs, which should (as you say) be legion. I just got lazy.

All village fete-type community responses welcome here.

(No, madam, you cannot take that goldfish in a bag home with you. Health and safety regulations, you know. Bugger the fact that your little girl successfully threw a ring around it.)

PS: I think Microsoft should make critical updates mandatory. With the “worst” option being to install updates voluntarily for a period of say 2 days, and after that the updates to be installed automatically. This would silence people who claim they have updates turned off because they want to defrag first. That way we will stop having people whine about how Twitter doesn’t render correctly on their IE6 or how they can’t find the security center (yes, some people still have SP1). But then the loons would pop out of their holes saying how Microsoft force feeds WGA to users, so it probably won’t happen.

@drloser
I actually recommended him a chromebook. He just wanted an “IOS” for the desktop. it’s either that or getting a mac, which are overpriced.

One more edit needed, K.

Thanks!

@garegin:

Just pick something else to do.

IE6 => IE8 (or IE9, if your OS supports it) is painless and free and works.

Buying a chromebook?

OK, kid, just keep spreading the kool-aid slime. Somebody will thank you for it, some day, but it won’t be me and it won’t be your customer.

Jeebs.

Just downloading Chrome (or Safari if you want pretty and blurry, or Opera if you are austere and appreciate the history)?

Or even (bleugh) the Doomed Firefox?

There are several silly and offensive choices you could make here.

But buying an entirely new device, just to upgrade your Internet Browser?

Please, for the Love of, just get out of this business and do something for which you are more suitable.

Feng Shui springs to mind. I can offer alternatives, for free. Just get out and go away. It will be worth my “free.”

I don’t think macs are overpriced. Consider the normal 3 year lifespan of the average computer, the difference between spending 1200 and 1400 doesn’t really matter. You’re literally talking about a difference of 10 cents a day.

It’d be like claiming you were doing long term savings by purchasing lattes instead of cappuccinos because of the 50 cent price difference.

again, you are talking about someone who has a hard time figuring out icons and clicking properly. wouldn’t the chromebook be a good choice?

“wouldn’t the chromebook be a good choice?”

To cut the long story short, no, it wouldn’t.

And, yes, you are both condescending and misleading the way you treat your customers. You just don’t seem to notice how little knowing how to sell a computer qualifies you to offer support or advice to even your grampma – let alone people who know absolutely nothing about you. Telling your victims… I mean, “customers”, to use Chomebooks won’t change the slightest of the fact that they can’t tell the difference between USB ports and their own bottoms. They’ll still at the end of the day wind up in an unfamiliar territory that they are unequiped to navigate through, but only this time they’ll find themselves hitting brick walls shall they decide to venture out of the confines of the Internet.

There is a reason that businesses spend good money just to train their employees to use their workstations properly, and you are just doing everyone a disservice by forcing your unrealistic expectations of computers and people in general onto them.

Worse still, if they ever become familiar with it, they’ll wind up being confused as to why their chromebook can’t edit videos or some other common task most people do with their computers.

except that user testing has shown over and over again that users get confused with too many options. a watered down device like the chromebook makes sense. now, my first advice would be to tough it out and learn a normal OS, but if the person is unwilling to do that why is a chromebook so horrible of a choice. i mean many people live almost entirely in their PSPs Wiis or smartphones without needing a computer.

“except that user testing has shown over and over again that users get confused with too many options.”

User testing? No kidding! Does anyone actually need to conduct studies in order to comprehend a fact as trivial as people get confused at the sight of more than one button?

While we are at it, why not reduce the dashboard of every car to just one button and one indicator? Oh, wait, that reminds of something…

I’m all for simplicity, but if the guy wants a streamlined experience, why not just get him an iPad? It’s got all the browsing, email and social capabilities, but it’s got a much richer app ecosystem. It’s not more complicated than a chrome book, plus there are more people who own one so more people who can actually offer help or advice.

“I’m all for simplicity”

I think I’ll put this here for good measure:

“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

— Albert Einstein

the ipad is better than a chromebook because it actually has real apps. I guess an android for intel would be a better choice. by better I mean like better getting a bacterial std instead of a viral one.
there is a reason that desktop OSs are not dumbed down, it’s because they would suck. there is however a niche of people who cannot handle a proper guitar and need to practice on the learner’s one first.

:banjo:

@garegin:

I genuinely don’t think it’s a very large niche of people (and as an aside I have never seen, nor would recommend, a “learner’s guitar”).

I can’t stop anybody buying a Chromebook if they genuinely feel that’s what they want, but I would be loathe to recommend one. They’d have every right to come back and complain when they find out they’ve just wasted $400 or whatever on something that turns into a brick when outside wireless hotspots.

If you must do this (and I see no reason for it at all), then try the analogy of a bike with training wheels. At some arbitrary point in the future, you just remove the training wheels and, tada, you have a fully-functioning bike!

The implementation of this in the computing world would, I suggest, be a Windows 7 set as a kiosk. (It could even be a Ubuntu kiosk, but then we’re back to bricks again.) You don’t even have to expend much effort on the lock-down process, because there’s no security implication if they guy gets out of the walled garded: just power down and power back up again.

This, surely, is about as simple as anybody could want.

I never got the point behind Chromebooks. Why not get a Tranformer Prime? The primary motivation for buying a Chromebook is if you want just an internet machine and don’t want to do the initial fixing up and maintainance that comes with a Windows machine and don’t want to pay the cost of a Macbook.
But the Prime can do everything a Chromebook can (including minimal maintainance and fast wake from sleep times), plus some other things like local storage, music playback and real games (not just browser games), when you ll eventually realize the cloud can’t do everything.

The only chance for Chromebooks to sell is based on the shininess factor (aka what made first gen iphones sell) but Google botched that too by choosing the x86 architecture, which means Chronebooks have the battery life, thickness and fan noise of a 32bit machine.

On the bright side, now Linux has a steady hardware target, so no more “WinbredHardware” excuses. Dear freetards, Ubuntu should run perfectly on a Chomebook, right? So if some poor guy’s sound breaks again after an upgrade or wakeup from standby doesn’t work, and he runs Ubuntu on a Chromebook, we can walk around the 'hood saying how much Ubuntu sucks. Do we have a deal?

32 bit machine = x86-64 machine (slip of the mind)

@Kurkos:

Um, well, you’re responding to somebody who apparently is several (Ubuntu) bricks short of being a Freetard. And I know that’s difficult to believe.

Garegin started with “its not MS’s fault that average users are morons,” continued with his entertaining stories of everyday life in Best Buy or something, had another go at said morons, and finally came up with the brilliant idea of selling his moron customers a Chromebook.

Even though one would assume that the customer in question had a PC of some sort in the first place. Otherwise, what was all that about IE?

“i like my customers. the guy who was using ie6 is a terrific dude.”

Apparently he likes them so much that, not only is he prepared to forgo the obvious solution to their temporary (and rather unusual, for anybody under the age of forty) inability to double-click the browser icon, but he is also prepared to ignore the fact that they are already in possession of perfectly fine hardware that might simply need a bit of idiot-proofing.

I think my solution here is superior; if only in terms of cost and customer satisfaction and indeed SANITY!

Yours, on the other hand, would certainly be preferable to buying a Chromebook.

I’m not actually sure what Google are thinking on that one.

a learner’s guitar uses a shorter scale so it is easier on smaller hands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(string_instruments)

btw. the hardware excuse is BS, since they are too cheap to fix purely software bugs. the bottom line of FOSS software development is lack of resources. that is why they don’t have the muscle to write gtk apps and instead use ncurses gui.

“a learner’s guitar uses a shorter scale so it is easier on smaller hands.”

Aucoustic guitars have 4 standard sizes and the proper choice is entirely dependent to your height (or palm size), not how much you are familiar with the instrument. There is simply no such thing as a “learner’s guitar”.

“[T]hey don’t have the muscle to write gtk apps and instead use ncurses gui.”

Right…

ncurses is a library for text-based applications, whereas gtk is a GUI toolkit for X-based appliactions. Comparing the two is like comparing an apple to an orange. Didn’t they teach you that at the computer shop or something, huh-huh?

i don’t understand why you have to be snide about it. but beginer guitar’s are often the smaller neck scale.
http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric-Guitars/Les-Paul/Gibson-USA/Les-Paul-Jr/Specs.aspx
http://www.fender.com/products/search.php?partno=0310101506
http://www.ibanez.com/ElectricGuitars/model-IJX25
the ncurses comment is accurate. it is easier to write a command line app then to write a full app.
if you choose to put ubuntu on a usb stick and choose the mac option they give you instructions in using the terminal and type the commands manually. they are too lazy to even make a bash script.
but I guess i’m a unwashed moron in your eyes because I am not a key developer for Adobe Premier but work in a shop so you will just shoot me down.

“i don’t understand why you have to be snide about it. but beginer guitar’s are often the smaller neck scale.”

Again, that has everything to do with body height/palm size and none to do with familiarity. I sincerely hope you haven’t been going around giving advices on purchasing guitars.

“[T]he ncurses comment is accurate.”

Yet we have:

“[I]f you choose to put ubuntu on a usb stick and choose the mac option they give you instructions in using the terminal and type the commands manually.”

I don’t want to snide about this, but your overconfidence in your pitiful understanding of everything – be it ncurses or guitar – is simply too glaring to ignore.

snide -> be snide

@garegin:

In the interests of bing conciliatory, I would happily consider an ncurses application to be a (extremely basic) GUI.

In the interests of strict accuracy and sanity, I would point out that I haven’t seen one in the last ten years, and that your assertion is distinctly questionable.

Given toolkits these days, it is actually easier to write a simple GUI than it is to write a simple ncurses application. Of course, that doesn’t stop the Loon botching it.

technically you are correct. but there are no pro guitars made for small hands. this is because shorter guitars have issues with intonation. these small guitars are essentially toys. show me a pro guitar for “small body/hands” and I will concede the point.

Small hands? Screw the guitar. Get a banjo. Trust me.. the neck is thing enough for even my hands… and the whole instrument is heavy enough to kill a rogue moose/Republican/freetard if needed (or at least cause a deep case of coma!).

“technically you are correct. but there are no pro guitars made for small hands.”

If by “pro guitars” you mean astronomically expensive blings with big brands and huge names attached them (like, “looky, that’s what Jimi Hendrix used back in 1969 Woodstock”), then sure.

The intonation bit, however, simply defies the most basic common knowledge about guitars and even string instruments in general. Hell, there are even guides out there teaching you how to adjust intonation properly for smaller guitars – you know, just the same way you would for a full-size. This is not even to mention full-size guitars can, too, suffer from the same intonation problems without proper designs and/or adjustments, or that you can’t learn an instrument properly when it’s simply out of tune every step of the way.

You know what? Just knock it off with this pro/amateur nonsense already. You couldn’t get it right with ncurses/gtk, and you certainly aren’t getting it right with guitars.

Better idea. Get a piano. I’ve seen small Asian hands absolutely destroy a piano; metaphorically.

Unless you try to play some rhapsodies from Franz Liszt, because you gonna need to cut through your ligaments between your index fingers and thumbs in order to reach the keys on the piano, when you are playing the more difficult parts.

I’ve yet to meet a piece I couldn’t play on the piano. Then again, a good pianist improvises.