Rony Bill wrote:
On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 12:00, sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:
In short M$ is widely used not because it's easy but because of a whole history of piracy and illegal practices. And they did not make the pc popular. It was the low cost Taiwanese manufacturer who provided a platform for software like dos, wordstar, wordperfect, lotus123, gemplus, dbase, Turbo pascal, etc. And they existed BEFORE msdos and windows3.0.
They have existed but it is windows that became a household name. Go to the various homes and small offices and ask them what is windows and ask them the list of the above mentioned software. How windows became popular, by begging, borrowing or stealing is besides the point.
More than that the reason has been the monopoly! or TINA factor. Till some time back Windows (& its variants) was the only OS available. If there are alternatives people explore (esp if they all come a same pirated CD cost!), So say you have Paintshop pro, Corel draw, photoshop all known and used Now that linux flavours are around, there is more experimentation, though most have a mental block as Linux being diffcult to use. There to a block is in partitioning stage, since the HDD space is already gobbled up , it becomes quite an effort to clear & make space for linux.
I had faced a panic situation when I wiped out a client's partition table in order to simply remove a partition virus. His tally, mail and docs were in it. Luckily I recovered the files and saved my ass and even got paid for it. I am not claiming that windows is the best, I am only saying its the simplest to learn and get familiar with. Give newbies linux to install, configure and use and do the same experiment with windows.
Well if they use linux they wont have to face same situation (partition table virus! or any other virus).As non-root user the worst they can do is wipe own home dir , or get a thrashed filesystem/ crashed hdd. And Linux assumes you know what you are doing, after all you are the intelligent being, pc is just a box ready to obey your orders!
Regards, Karunakar