still blaming users
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Dec 18, 2008 11:37 AM EDT |
...for the deep and incurable flaws in Windows and all of Redmond-ware. |
| azerthoth Dec 18, 2008 12:22 PM EDT |
I agree that a huge majority if windows problems stem from the OS itself. However there are bad *nix practices as well. The user does need to take some of the heat for doing idiotic things with their computers. You dont leave the keys to your car in the ignition, you dont leave signed checks laying around, and you dont run a windows computer without anti virus. Perhaps expand that, windows applications without an anti virus, as I have picked up windows virii and had them function when using wine. |
| dinotrac Dec 18, 2008 12:58 PM EDT |
I blame the users, too. If you use Windows, you deserve what you get. |
| gus3 Dec 18, 2008 3:00 PM EDT |
@az: I don't want Windows at all, with or without anti-virus. |
| Steven_Rosenber Dec 18, 2008 4:03 PM EDT |
What I'm trying to say is that given the system users are running, if it's Windows, they need to behave/act accordingly. If Linux was as popular on the desktop as Windows, I bet there would be binary packages and source code floating around everywhere, and those packages and code would be of varying quality and would play ill or well with different systems. One of the things that keeps Linux users safer is the software-repository concept. Having a single, secure place to find software that most likely works and very likely won't screw things up is a huge improvement over the average Windows user's method of trolling the Web and downloading and installing any old executable they find. (That's how the user in my post got into trouble.) Since Macs are also part of that "legacy" mindset in which software can come from anywhere, even OS X users are screwing up their Unix-like machines by downloading and installing garbage packages. As tuxchick taught me so well in her Cookbook (the networking book is going to be my Xmas present to me ...), s/he who is in front of the box owns the box, and in the case of the average user, s/he who is in front of the box and starts clicking on stuff can and will screw up that box, too. I'm no expert on locking down Windows, if it indeed can be done, but I know well that in the Linux/Unix world, having someone actually administer the box and NOT giving the user the root password (or sudo privileges) goes a long, long way toward keeping that box healthy. Yes, Windows is designed for (or not designed against) corruption and failure. But an Ubuntu newbie armed with sudo privileges (and not afraid to use them) isn't something that makes me feel good. |
| azerthoth Dec 18, 2008 4:22 PM EDT |
@gus, I agree 100%. I can personally live, and do, without windows. It's the games that are my downfall, however I do limit myself to what works with wine. That being said, I wont force my choices on anyone, I'll help people make a correct choice, but even my wife runs Windows. She has been warned though, the first time she asks me to fix her computer it gets Linux so she has taken the precaution of making sure all her music is DRM free. Steven's last two sentences are the most telling though, it doesnt matter the OS, their is some truth to end user fubar. |
| tracyanne Dec 18, 2008 4:41 PM EDT |
Quoting:I'm no expert on locking down Windows, if it indeed can be done, It can be done, but it's not pretty. It actually works quite well in a corporate setting, although in my experience very few corporates lock Windows down properly, where the ability of the user to install arbitrary software really should be curtailed. It doesn't work well in a general usage home user setting, which is why almost every home user has their privileges set to Administrator, Linux works much better, whether you use sudo or su to get temporary root privileges, and on top of that the Linux paradigm discourages arbitrary software installs. Unfortunately way too few commercial and proprietary companies that supply Linux targeted software understand or want to use the package management system - that is a marketing failure on the part of Linux developers, as much as it is a NIH/control issue on the part of the commercial/proprietary developers - so far too often there is a need to download and install arbitrary 3rd party packages, which, in my opinion, reduces security, as it introduces the same variable to Linux as plagues Windows and Mac. |
| tuxchick Dec 18, 2008 6:40 PM EDT |
hi Steven, the part that always loses me is when articles don't shriek "FLEE SCREAMING FROM THIS STINKING PILE!!" Or if one does not wish to yell, a genteel admonition that "Friends don't let friends use Windows." Soo...that's just me :). You are right on that user education is definitely an important part on any platform. |
| Steven_Rosenber Dec 18, 2008 9:48 PM EDT |
Quoting:"FLEE SCREAMING FROM THIS STINKING PILE!!" My main office desktop is Windows XP on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM. It has its good and bad days. In the morning at home, I wrote the blog post upon which this thread is based (on the iBook G4, but I digress), and by the early afternoon at the office on my XP box, I was working on some cross-platform CSS issues (everything works but IE ... go figure) and had IE 7, FF 3 and Google Chrome running, along with the Notepad++ text editor, and the thing just went nuts. I got that "you're out of virtual memory" message, the thing was swapping forever. Maybe three browsers is too much for XP in 512 MB of RAM, but your words in the quote above are apropos, given the situation. I thought again of splitting my work at the office among two boxes, with the XP just for what will only run in XP (basically one proprietary pile of %^&) and the rest in Linux or OpenBSD (now the latter because that's what I have installed). I never liked running IE in WINE, but I might have to go back to that just to test my pages. Don't you just love when your page looks great in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari but not in IE? |
| tracyanne Dec 18, 2008 9:53 PM EDT |
Quoting:Don't you just love when your page looks great in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari but not in IE? Happens to me all the time. |
| tuxchick Dec 19, 2008 12:42 AM EDT |
I love having to keep multiple web browsers just to make sure I can visit all the sites that I need to. Poor old Konqueror, as much as I love it, keels over on nasty insane script-heavy sites that don't bother Firefox. Or maybe Konqueror is the smart one :) |
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