On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 21:59 +1030, Tim wrote: > I'm semi-serious... Have you ever tried to get something technical > going for someone completely non-technically minded, who's never going > to get it? "Frustrating" is an understatement. OK, yes - I can see that. I just wasn't including entirely non-technical folk in my target audience for the app. > It'd have to be a damn foolproof device to survive what fools would do > to it. Not just breaking, but misconfiguring it to the point where > someone else has to spend ages un-stuffing it. I appreciate what you're getting at here although I'm not convinced it's a serious enough problem to justify doing nothing. There are already compliance tools out there that are widely used by the elderly and others who may struggle with a highly technological solution (pill boxes, specialised alarm clocks etc.). I am explicitly aiming this at users who are technical enough to own a PDA, smartphone or other device that would run the software and who find this a useful way to manage a busy life and a complex medication regime. My interest here is entirely personal & selfish :) I have a busy life, a Fedora box and an N900 and quite a few medicines that I need to take regularly and make sure that I'm adhering to (it's not "work-related" - I'll probably move to using my home addresses/hosting once things are underway). > I don't "worry" about it, but I feel sorry for technical support who > have to deal with the silliest of things from the silliest of people, > and have to explain quite complex things to someone over the phone who > doesn't have a clue about what they're doing. Support engineering is my day job so I know exactly what you mean. ;) > One of the second best things about my move to Linux, was being able to > tell my clueless Windows friends "I don't use Windows anymore," when > they ask me about trying to deal with browser won't browse, how do I get > rid of a virus, and so on, and so forth. ;-) Now, the conversation I need to learn that. I spent 8 years without a Windows machine but friends still seem to assume that I know how to fix their Windows problems, work their Windows web authoring apps, etc! ;) > lasts about 15 seconds, instead of 15 minutes. I've spent well over an > hour on the phone, before, hand holding through the most basic of fixups > to things. I've talked my mother through a full fs recovery from single-user mode (including rooting the box with init=/bin/bash as she was struggling to enter my 20-char root password properly :). It's one of the reasons I love Linux - when things go bad like that I can provide precise character-by-character instructions and know that as long as I get accurate information on the results I can guide even a novice through complex recovery steps. Regards, Bryn. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
