Adventures in public printing (Windows security)

A little side note today about an experience of mine from yesterday. I found myself needing to print a few PDFs from my Gmail account while I was out and about. Hmm where to go for printing that’s along my journey? My first stop was the internet cafe in the local London Drugs 

After paying for a 15 min slot of time I sat down at the XP computer, logged into my Gmail, found the e-mail, and clicked the attachment. But much to my surprise the file wouldn’t open even though the Adobe file was recognized by the system (Adobe icon and all)

An error dialog told me the file was blocked by the system due to security restrictions. Well I guess even PDF files have caused security problems before so after getting a refund on my time I left and tried to find another place to print. My next stop, the local library.

As I travelled I wondered what the point was in having an internet cafe with printing facilities if a person couldn’t even open a PDF file let alone a Word document. Who the heck wants to pay to print plain text only? Such a shame that the Windows security situation has brought things to this I thought.

I sat down at one of the 30 or so crowded library computers and was greeted with… “Red Hat Linux?!!” I said aloud as the librarian helped me to log in.

She smiled and said “Yeah” enthusaistically.

“Well this is new.” I replied. The last time I had been in the public library they had been using XP on all their machines.

“It’s more secure” The librarian replied as Firefox started up.

Moments later my document was printed and I was leaving the library.

This was one small example of how businesses that had previously relied on Microsoft Windows for years are saying “Enough is enough. We’re done with Windows and it’s problems and getting something better.” and it’s only going to get more and more common. The Microsoft era is indeed starting to end.

Have you experienced any such examples? Let’s hear about them in the comments.