Re: Convincing someone to switch to Linux
On Monday 17 March 2003 06:23, Pigeon wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 03:05:57AM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
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> > On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 10:29:42AM +1200, cr wrote:
> > > Agreed, but unfortunately there's all this spurious 'compatible' crap.
> > > Nobody was ever scared off buying a GM car because it wasn't
> > > 'Ford-compatible'.
> >
> > Really? So that's why you see so many government issue vehicles that
> > aren't a Ford Crown Victoria or a Chevrolet Impala, or if it's been on
> > the road for a while, a Fordrolet Crown Impala. There's not a whole
> > lot that can't be exchanged between those two on most model years.
>
> Well, the analogy works better wrt British Fords and GMs. Over here,
> one can proverbially assemble any set of Ford running gear into any
> Ford bodyshell. So you can take the guts out of your 1300 Escort and
> fit a Capri V6 and the overdrive gearbox out of a Transit van, and it
> all just bolts together. You can play similar games within the
> British/Vauxhall and German/Opel GM lines. But you can't put GM bits
> in a Ford, or vide versa.
>
> But as far as most drivers are concerned, Fords and GMs are
> compatible. The steering wheel, pedals etc are all in the same
> relative positions and work the same way. If you were to make a car
> with even slightly different controls - like a different gearshift
> pattern - nobody would buy it.
>
> Pigeon
Well, to take the analogy back to Linux - vs - Windoze - all word
processors work pretty much the same. All spreadsheets work pretty much the
same. The difference between M$Word and AbiWord, or Excel and Gnumeric,
is no greater than than the difference between Win95 and W2K versions of
M$Word / Excel. Just like hopping out of an Escort into a Vauxhall.
But Windoze users won't believe that. They imagine anything but the M$
crudware they're accustomed to will be 'too difficult'.
cr
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