Blood Lesson WARNING re "WARTY" Install

Matthew S-H mathbymath at aol.com
Wed May 11 00:27:35 UTC 2005


On May 10, 2005, at 1:49 PM, Ewan Mac Mahon wrote:
> On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 11:45:38AM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
>> On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 05:41:40PM +0200, Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:
> Who cares about getting converts like this? The OP is either daft 
> enough
> to miss several big obvious warnings and arrogant enough to assume that
> the fault lies with an OS sucessfully used by thousands of other people
> rather than with him, or he's trolling on purpose.  Either way he's not
> likely to be much of an asset to the community.
>
>> That attitude is endemic among the Linux/Unix community, and it needs
>> to stop.
> It really doesn't. If a newcomer barged into your local pub and started
> shouting unfounded abuse at everyone you'd rightly expect them to be
> chucked out and barred from coming back. This is a relatively pleasant
> list to hang around in; people are mostly nice, knowledgable and
> helpful. The OP is none of those things everyone here is better off if
> they just shut up and go away.
The example you gave doesn't hold.  A newcomer barging into a bar and 
bothering patrons is totally without cause.  If his drive was indeed 
erased, then vailima has good reason to moan.  And better analogy would 
be a whistle-blower in an illegal drug operation.  If the 
whistle-blower tries to speak out, there will likely be an attempt to 
"silence" him/her.  Yet, he/she does have a just cause.  If he/she does 
decide to prevent the selling of these drugs on the open market, then 
it would be a tragedy if he/she was killed for doing so.  On the other 
hand, it could be argued that he/she deserved what he/she got because 
he/she made the conscious choice to join the drug operation in the 
first place, despite the fact that he/she probably knew well that it 
was a dangerous thing to get involved with.  So, should the police help 
this poor soul?

Also, we shouldn't assume that everyone bothers to read warning.  
ESPECIALLY windows users.  If all of them read warnings, there wouldn't 
be even close to as much spyware on windows.  After all, most of these 
applications show you some sentence mixed somewhere in a license 
agreement for another program that says that it is being installed.  
And plus, most Windows users are not experienced enough with computers 
to be patient.  Some will likely sit down and practically hold the 
enter key down during the installation, lolz.

Anyway, I think the problem here is not so one-sided.  True, I agree 
with most people that vailima is partly to blame because he should have 
read the installer's instructions more carefully, but it should not be 
so easy for a user to wipe out years of data.  The least there could be 
is a confirmation of "Are you sure?".

Keep in mind everything I've said is based on the fact that I am 
assuming vailima really did have this problem and is not just 
"trolling".  But I prefer to believe a person unless I get some 
specific reason why he or she is lying.  And I have yet to find any 
evidence that vailima is doing that.  After all, is it really so hard 
to believe that a user might just assume the default option is best?  
After all, there are plenty of users that stick with the "default 
option" of Windows, despite the fact that we all know that it is vastly 
inferior and that linux is a free conversion.


~Matt
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