On Wed 07 Apr 2004 at 08:59:32, Bryan Murdock said: > Do you think Aunt Tillie and her family might have more than one > computer, and may want to share a printer between them ever?
Do you know how Aunt Tillie is going to share that printer? A floppy disk and sneakernet. Setting up a LAN requires a significant amount of computer proficiency, no matter what operating system those computers are running on. Think of what you have to do in Windows to share a printer: - Physically hook the two systems together - Install your ethernet card drivers, TCP/IP, and Client for MS networks - Set both machines up with a proper IP address so they can actually talk to each other - Share the printer on the server - Install the printer drivers on the client and attach it to the shared printer on the server This isn't a simple task. It would take even me a half hour to set up, assuming that I didn't hit a single problem along the way. If Aunt Tillie is capable of debugging her own network problems, then she is by definition no longer Aunt Tillie. She is a proficient computer user. The point is that computers require some proficiency to use. Period. No matter how simple you make the OS, you're still going to have to learn some basic skills in order to use them. And a lot of things that we geeks consider to be "basic skills" are so far outside the realm of basic computer use that the questions, much less the answers, don't even occur to Aunt Tillie. -- Soren Harward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://theboard.byu.edu/ "Americans are always attempting to run away from conformity, but unfortunately they always start running in the same direction." -- Art Buchwald
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