Ben Lutgens wrote: > I just got turned off of this by too many bad experiences. I helped a > person who wanted to use linux get a piece of hardware setup and do some > other things for two hours. I tried to teach the individual what I was > doing and so-forth, after a while I noticed that glazed in their eye that > said "I'm not really interested, you're boring me" now the person is asking > me all sorts of question and shows no will to learn what-so-ever (this has > happened to me alot lately) and I ask myself two questions: > > 1.) Why does this person feel the need to use linux? > 2.) Why did I waste my time helping? > Those are good questions and perhaps they should be answered before you invest your time in worthless pursuits but I think its fair to distinguish the people you are referencing from people who will expend the time and energy to go to an organized training seminar. You don't need to fight every battle in order to win the war. The success of Linux certainly has some bearing on your own growth potential. You might argue that Linux belongs in the server market but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that NT server would never have existed without windows desktop. For many social and psychological reasons the two environments are closely intertwined. Many people actually believed the GUI was a simplification of the computing environment because they don't understand the complex architetures required to support those GUI's. Companies dumped their data centers and their technical staff and bought a whole bunch of PC's and they shifted all that cost to local departments so it looked like a great cost saving. Of course now days many companies are struggling to get back to centralized management. From where I sit Linux has a better position than windows for thin clients and imbedded devices that will likely provide much of tomorrows user interface. -- Paul Overby xpoverby at attbi.com