The thing isn’t broken, the design is

[tanngrisnir]

I thought this report was interesting: half of all “malfunctioning” products are in full working order, it’s just that the poor bloody customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices. Even worse for them, companies frequently dismiss them as ‘nuisance calls.’ It was a nice touch that the study being reported involved giving managers products

Comments

[wibbble]

I think that aviation and the military, at least, are relatively immune from this sort of nonsense: if it's not easily understandable at a glance, neither the aviation industry nor the military are going to touch it.

I can just picture someone on a field trial of some new planning/communication device deciding to just drop it in a pool of mud and go back to using a map and a radio rather than figure out the icons.

[tanngrisnir]

I doubt the average user would see those demos and set about installing betas to try them. The choice is one of Linux’s strengths, not a weakness. I loathe Gnome, but some people love it - I can use the sort of desktop I like, and so can they.

I don’t get what you mean by this:

but then you might not be able to use the same email client as your friend who uses KDE when you’re using Gnome.In the first place, what does your friend’s email client have to with the email client you use? I think I’m missing your point. In the second place, just because something is a “Gnome” or “KDE” application doesn’t mean you can only use it from that desktop environment. ATM, I am running KDE and using a newsreader which is supposedly designed for Gnome

[wibbble]

> In the first place, what does your friend’s email client have to with the email client you use? I think

[tanngrisnir]

Actually, as far as I can see there would be no problem with running KMail under Gnome. And email clients are hardly that difficult to set up, not these days. Anyone who can set up KMail could probably help his pal to set up whatever mail client they want to use. :)

The thing about JR User is, he or she would probably go for a name they had heard of, such as Mandriva (I think it is), SuSE, or something like that. They aren’t all that likely to try to set up Slackware or Debian or Xandros. Most of the well-known distros know come with KDE and Gnome (as well as other options) - you don’t have to pick a distro for your desktop, you can install both and try them out, then stick with KDE the way most sensible people do. :o)

It is now the case that a reasonably technically competent random user - I am specifically excluding here certain of my friends who can barely play a CD in a CD player; I mean someone who can make a fair stab at programming a standard VCR (not some of the ridiculously complex ones) - could be told, Go get [distro],

[wibbble]

If someone has physical access they don't /need/ your passwords: they can simply boot the machine from a LiveCD and access everything as root - or just open it and remove the HD.

Mac OS X, by default, disables root - sudo's available, but you can't log in as root. 'Administrator' users (including the first user, by default) are in the wheel group, so they can sudo.

Multiple instances of X11, and switching between them, is certainly something that's been around *nix for years, but it's definitely beyond the install-and-forget kind of thing you're talking about. The big strength of Mac OS X isn't so much that it's introducing never-heard-of-features, it's that it's making them effortlessly to use.

[tanngrisnir]

Sorry, I didn't put it very clearly. Yes, I know that if someone has access to the machine they can do what you say (in fact, I did it myself to one of my hard drives after a catastrophic double crash - and come to think of it, it wasn’t that simple, since you had to know how to set permissions) - what I actually meant was that most of the people you need to worry about getting unwanted access to your machine don’t have a sufficient level of knowledge to do that. For them, having a password restriction is a good safety measure

[wibbble]

You're not the only one that's surprised. :o)

I'll be sticking with Mac OS X, though, for any machine I need to interact with directly. I was planning to get an AMD64 machine later on this year so that I could work on some stuff locally, but it would probably be a box without a monitor.