I am one of the volunteers that looks after the IT equipment at a community centre. The equipment includes 5 x PC's located in a room for the public to use. These PC's were originally donated with a single drive that has Windows 10. We add another drive which we make the Sata-0 drive, and move the cable for the Windows 10 drive so it is on the Sata-2 port. On the drive that we have added we install Ubuntu-Mate. By default, when the PC's power on, they boot up Ubuntu-Mate. Over the summer holidays the main users of these PC's are local children in the age range of 6 to 10 years old. I recently walked into the room which has the PC's and one of children recognised me as the IT repair man. The boy came over to me, and pointing at one of the PC's he said, "It's broken. It doesn't work." I looked across at the PC and saw that it was displaying a Windows 10 screen that appeared to be functioning OK, and noticed that there was nobody sitting using this computer. The other four PC's were running Ubuntu-Mate and children were busy using them. I said to the boy, "Yes it does look like its broken. I'll fix it." I proceeded to shutdown Windows 10, and found the Ubuntu-Mate drive had failed to the extent that it wasn't being recognised by the BIOS. I replaced the failed drive, installed Ubuntu-Mate from a USB stick, and told the boy it was fixed and he could use it again. I thought it was an encouraging sign that what these children perceive as a normal PC is one that is running Ubuntu-Mate and what they perceive as a broken PC is one that is running Windows 10. cheers, Ian
Nice one Ian. It shows the power of confirmation bias and the network effect. Confirmation bias means new information/phenomena are biased to wards what we already know. What he knew was Linux so when he tried to use Windows the same way it didn't work."It's broken. It doesn't work." Because Windows was the OS that the vast majority leaned to use then other OS were seen as wrong or inferior by the majority. And because Windows was "what everybody ts using" developers wrote programs for it, so its advantage was increased and entrenched - the network effect. With the advance of mobile phones now the first OS most kids learn is OSX or android, so Microsoft's dominance is waning rapidly. Rod On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 23:44, Ian Stewart <ianstewart56(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
I am one of the volunteers that looks after the IT equipment at a community centre. The equipment includes 5 x PC's located in a room for the public to use. These PC's were originally donated with a single drive that has Windows 10. We add another drive which we make the Sata-0 drive, and move the cable for the Windows 10 drive so it is on the Sata-2 port. On the drive that we have added we install Ubuntu-Mate. By default, when the PC's power on, they boot up Ubuntu-Mate.
Over the summer holidays the main users of these PC's are local children in the age range of 6 to 10 years old. I recently walked into the room which has the PC's and one of children recognised me as the IT repair man. The boy came over to me, and pointing at one of the PC's he said, "It's broken. It doesn't work."
I looked across at the PC and saw that it was displaying a Windows 10 screen that appeared to be functioning OK, and noticed that there was nobody sitting using this computer. The other four PC's were running Ubuntu-Mate and children were busy using them.
I said to the boy, "Yes it does look like its broken. I'll fix it."
I proceeded to shutdown Windows 10, and found the Ubuntu-Mate drive had failed to the extent that it wasn't being recognised by the BIOS. I replaced the failed drive, installed Ubuntu-Mate from a USB stick, and told the boy it was fixed and he could use it again.
I thought it was an encouraging sign that what these children perceive as a normal PC is one that is running Ubuntu-Mate and what they perceive as a broken PC is one that is running Windows 10.
cheers, Ian _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug
I am one of the volunteers that looks after the IT equipment at a community centre. The equipment includes 5 x PC's located in a room for the public to use. These PC's were originally donated with a single drive that has Windows 10. We add another drive which we make the Sata-0 drive, and move the cable for the Windows 10 drive so it is on the Sata-2 port. On the drive that we have added we install Ubuntu-Mate. By default, when the PC's power on, they boot up Ubuntu-Mate.
Over the summer holidays the main users of these PC's are local children in the age range of 6 to 10 years old. I recently walked into the room which has the PC's and one of children recognised me as the IT repair man. The boy came over to me, and pointing at one of the PC's he said, "It's broken. It doesn't work."
I looked across at the PC and saw that it was displaying a Windows 10 screen that appeared to be functioning OK, and noticed that there was nobody sitting using this computer. The other four PC's were running Ubuntu-Mate and children were busy using them.
I said to the boy, "Yes it does look like its broken. I'll fix it."
I proceeded to shutdown Windows 10, and found the Ubuntu-Mate drive had failed to the extent that it wasn't being recognised by the BIOS. I replaced the failed drive, installed Ubuntu-Mate from a USB stick, and told the boy it was fixed and he could use it again.
I thought it was an encouraging sign that what these children perceive as a normal PC is one that is running Ubuntu-Mate and what they perceive as a broken PC is one that is running Windows 10.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing, Ian. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
participants (3)
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Ian Stewart -
Peter Reutemann -
Roderick Aldridge