Blocking in Pidgin

[David Gerard]

2009/7/7 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
> 2009/7/7 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:

>> It's not Linux elitism, it's beleaguered middle-aged stepdad elitism ;-p

> :¬D Welcome to the real world of cynical old codgerspace.
> Also, for all that you're a Colonial yourself, as ani fule kno, the
> entire Web is in fact Murrican and therefore must conform to Murrican
> standards of humour. Which means the bleedin' obvious (e.g., The
> Onion) and no sarcasm or irony, because Murricans generally have
> non-functioning irony-detectors and get very offended and sniffy when
> they fail to notice it.


This is why I preferred Australian Usenet groups where possible: being
able to write without knowing the reader will translate it down to
American.


> The thing is, for many kids, The Intarweb is all that there is.
> Q.v.
> http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2770 - "Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu"
> For them, all it needs, apart from to be bloody quick to boot, is a
> top-flight web-browser. Arguably, possibly, a chat client too.


The chat client is essential. As is whatever will make YouTube work -
they tend to use YouTube as their handy instant jukebox for playing
any song they happen to be thinking of.

My sample of two flatly refuse to use Pidgin. Real MSN or nothing. I
am deeply annoyed MSN doesn't work in Wine as yet.

One spends her entire life playing Runescape, but fortunately Java
works quite well.

Free Software? No, they won't use it unless it (a) just works (b) the
way they're used to.

(The toddler is a lot easier to deal with - BBC iPlayer on Flash. She
also likes dancing to media players and watching the visualisations.)


- d.