[balug-talk] Good Letter in San Francisco Chronicle Today

[Jeffrey Siegal]

On Oct 9, 2006, at 10:18 , Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> I don't doubt that techies and reasonably intelligent individuals can
> use Linux on the desktop. However, if you've ever managed to go  
> through
> the process of dealing with a towed car, or paying a parking ticket,
> only to watch our fine local government lose the paperwork, mis-enter
> payment information, an d then issue a warrant, you'd be rather
> frightened that these savants might some day have to use anything more
> complicated than Windows 95.

This is so nonsensical I have to wonder if you are actually some kind  
of Microsoft shill.

First of all, there is nothing inherently "simple" or even easy to  
use about Windows 95.  Its just old.    An old OS can often be MORE  
DIFFICULT to deal with, if that means you can't hook up a replacement  
printer or mouse or whatever, because the currently available devices  
do not have drivers for the old OS.  (Not to mention viruses,  
crashes, filesystem corruption, etc. that are a really, really big  
problem for Windows 95, even when compared to new versions of Windows.)

Second of all, when someone is processing a towed car or a parking  
ticket, they're interacting with the (user interface component of)  
the operating system at all.  They're using some kind of custom  
application, generally a pretty thin layer on top of a database.  It  
makes no different in that case what operating system their data  
entry station happens to be using.