Dear European Windows user, please select your browser

[Aloone_Jonez]

I had a feeling that, that would confuse the US readers.

Yes, gas = Liquefied Petroleum Gas, Petrol = gasoline.

LPG is basically propane and butane mix and is much better than petrol but as said above, it's expensive to convert your car to.

  But we were locked in - upgrading to a new computer required upgrading to newer software

Surely you could've just got some old P3s?

Windows 98 should run on them or you could've gone with XP or Linux and run Windows 98 under a VM.

[Lead Head]

I find that VMs often have a lot of troubling communicating to devices plugged into the PC. I know (well at least pretty sure) its possible for them to pass through to ports and such, but I think its more trouble then its worth.

[reactosguy]

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=124750

As a result of Microsoft's easy competing browser download screen, IE has lost 2.5% share in France, 1% in Britain and 1.3% in Italy from February to March. And it's surprising when you find out Opera Software has seen sky rocketing downloads in Italy, Spain and Poland!

[worker201]

I had a feeling that, that would confuse the US readers.

Yes, gas = Liquefied Petroleum Gas, Petrol = gasoline.

In the US, we call that LNG (liquefied natural gas) or CNG (compressed natural gas).  It's used for buses and garbage trucks, but I've never seen it used for personal automobiles, and you can't just go to a store/station and buy it the way you can get diesel or gasoline.

[Lead Head]

There are some conversion kits to run cars on CNG, but finding a place to fill up is quite hard, but you do get decent fuel economy from what I can recall.

[reactosguy]

and also because virtually everybody working as a civil servant anywhere has got the microsoft fear (i mean, they think it's impossible to exist without having ms windows, and/or IE installed on every computer, they just can't understand any other possibility).

Yeah, because people used Windows and IE for years.

It's a shame to know that Microsoft can push this fear into to-be-brainwashed little kids. I mean, they use Windows and IE at home and in schools that refuse to switch to an alternative BECAUSE OF THIS BELIEF.

[worker201]

^ It's hard for some people, and we need to recognize it.  I can easily switch between a Mac and Windows and Linux, and I can use your computer as well as my own.  But I'm not an "average" computer user.  Most computer users have a difficult time adjusting to new situations, and don't accept change very well.  Here's a cool metaphor.  Let's say you speak English.  And let's say you go to a class 5 days a week where you learn how to speak in Spanish.  Except you don't really learn how to speak conversational Spanish, you just learn some colors and how to count to ten.  After a few years, you'd be saying "cinco rojo" like it was nothing.  And then imagine one day that you go to the class and a real Mexican is there, using slang and not articulating every syllable.  You'd be freaking out, wondering what the hell was going on.  You might pick up a few words here and there through context, but mostly you'd have no idea what was going on.  And then the Mexican leaves, and everyone is back to numbers and colors, and there's an audible sigh of relief.  Now imagine that the teacher says "Who wants to quit speaking Spanish and start speaking Mandarin Chinese?"  I bet not one fucking person in the class will be interested.

Spanish = Windows
Spanish from a native speaker = Windows trouble (virus, BSOD, etc)
Mandarin Chinese = Linux

It might not seem fair to compare computer operations with learning a foreign language, especially a foreign language that uses a different alphabet.  I learned Linux way quicker than I learned Spanish - hell, it was faster than learning English, and I'm a native speaker.  But again, that's me.  For the average computer user, switching to Linux would be about as much fun as switching to Mandarin.  Although they'd probably get somewhere eventually, it would be stressful and expensive and unproductive - just not worth it.

[Lead Head]

Yup, pretty much. I still see people every day that are pretty much afraid of error messages, or just about any dialog box that pops up. They either ignore it, hit cancel/do not allow/whatever, or panic and just reboot the computer. Even switching to a Mac would probably be hard for these types of people.

[worker201]

What's kinda sad, though, is that we let those people dictate the direction of the microcomputer industry.  The trouble doesn't come from having Windows on every secretary or account manager's desktop.  The trouble comes when scientists and engineers are also forced to have Windows on their desktop, because of silly things like hardware compatibility, or network interoperability.

[Calum]

i can't imagine someone being so dumb as to reboot for every dialog box! Thank goodness they're not mac users, remember when all the dialog boxes had a picture of a bomb on them? all those users'd be under their desks with tinfoil on their heads!

[yourlife]

Is it me or does Opera seem to have small pages (e.g. Google) ready for your death burial and super large 1 terabyte large files in under five seconds?