Slashdot Mirror
When Does Usability Become a Liability?
nasteric asks: "I caught myself in the middle of a very interesting discussion last Friday over Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee. The discussion had to do with usability and security. Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. They claimed making Linux a friend of Joe User will require it to 'open itself up' and become more susceptible to attack. Needless to say, this became an endless debate between our Microsoft Administrators and our Linux/Unix Administrators that will undoubtedly continue into the morning. Therefore I pose this question to the Slashdot community. Will making Linux more user friendly result in it becoming less secure? Hopefully your expertise will help shed some light on (and bring to and end) our discussion." Does decent usability necessarily imply the presence of vulnerabilities? Macs seem to have this area down pretty well, with little in the way of vulnerabilities. Can Linux software follow the same route?
As soon as autoexec.bat runs.
You are not the customer.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Cheese it, it's the cops!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You need a COMMIT; in there to make sure your transaction runs, otherwise my base will still belong to me. For great zig! COMMIT;
What had me thinking is why did the editor let us know that he was at Krispy Kreme's having donuts and coffee. That could have been left out.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I don't know...you might get a "funny" or two out of it.
"Many of the Microsoft Administrators I work with argued the more user friendly Linux becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. " Ummm... what makes a Microsoft Admininstrator the authority on vulernability and usability?
and an Indian fellow named "Jack" was assigned my case.
I cannot wait to hear from "Jack" and hear how his beloved "Mets" are doing in this fine baseball season.
I await with interest to hear his small talk about traveling on the "NJ Turnpike" to work.
Tech Support. You gotta love it.
Hey linux--how about you worry about that particular hurdle when it's within a light year away or so?
Even with 4 byte words (or 8 byte words on some monster big iron), 4000 bytes is not enough for all but the tiniest gif file. Now, gif being a 256 color only format, with no serious compression and an inability to depict sharp photographs of any significant resolution, I contend that no,
A picture is not ~1000 words.
4k is plenty for a nice ascii art
and so they think anything that's user friendly must be vulnerable. A classic logic error, whose name I forget right now.
I'm pretty sure that's called the "Chattering Marmot Dilema" I swear! look it up!
Thank goodness for Open Source! Many eyes, fewer bugs.
Of course command lines are friendly! Whenever I need to find a program that does something new, I just hit the tab key. The shell helpfully asks, "Display all 2414 possibilities? (y or n)". I hit "y", and then it's just a matter of looking at about 25 pages of program names until I find the one I want. It even shows "--More--" at the bottom of each page and lets me go to the next page when I want to, instead of whizzing all 2414 programs by at ludicrous speed. How much more user friendly can you get?
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
You had me at "Krispy Kreme". ;)
Anyone get a sense of irony here?
Denigrating command line (word based) control for graphical (icon based) control, because commands (words) are "not user friendly" and then complaining about people's lack of reading (word) comprehension skills?
Maybe if slashdot articles and comments were posted using pictograms rather than words they'd be more "user friendly"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
workbox:~magna > mod -h
MOD - Moderate Version 0.9a (2004, Mar 24)
usage: mod [arguments] [-|+]n comment [reason]
moderate the comment (up/down) n points for reason
arguments:
-h print this message
-v print MOD version number
-f force mod, even if no mod points
workbox:~magna > mod +1 8840959 insightfull
mod: unknown reason "insightfull"
workbox:~magna > mod +1 8840959 interesting
mod: you have no moderator points
workbox:~magna > mod -f +1 8840959 interesting
mod: you must be superuser to force a mod
workbox:~magna > su
Password: *************
workbox:~magna > mod -f +1 8840959 interesting
moderation complete
workbox:~magna > nethack &
How to acquire French cuisine in four simple steps:
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
they should form those eulas into ascii art displaying hot chicks.
then at least they would be viewed.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yes, but only if the concept is reasonably obvious.
How to "train" people to use the mouse? Why, get them to play Solitaire or Minesweeper.
The double-click is NOT intuitive.
You're new here, aren't you?
As far as I can tell, there is no word in everyday English that means 'being unable to speak the local language'.
Sure there is. "American."
Really? How come my system is missing this feature? Perhaps it's because I'm using Debian, and they want to make sure that the "--More--" prompt doesn't have any serious security flaws.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Basically imagine flipping programming languages and natural languages, so that you spoke in perl/c/asm/etc, and coded in english/french/german/etc.
Ick... and I thought american english was hard to understand...
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
From what I can tell, the parent to this post is the "second" post to this story. So, I'll post this here to get away from the noise of the replies to this story's first-post thread.
The above thread is (largely) an erudite, overthought, masturbatory, navel-gazing, pissing contest about CLI vs. GUI. In case you hadn't heard, that battle/debate was DECIDED in 1984. You can argue till the cows come home and are ground into hamburger, but history has already proven one the overwhelming winner regarding the term "usability."
I'm reminded of something Amborse Bierce once wrote that exposes the problem of syllogistic reasoning
For now, I'll just say that sometimes the problem with Slashdot is that there are many more than sixty diggers.
:P