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Re: [LUG] Newcomers to Linux (2)

 

Julian Hall wrote:
>
> Even now I have a friend who charges a £10 call-out and £10 per hour to 
> fix PCs of people who just cannot get it through their skulls that when 
> the Firewall asks them if something should be allowed access they don't 
> just click Yes to 'get rid of the annoying prompt'. 

I think poor design.

If it pops up a query the person doesn't understand, and making things
work requires clicking "OK", the user will click "OK". They'll click
"OK" even when they shouldn't, because they are conditioned to click the
boxes to make them go away. If I ran a conferencing software package,
the computer/firewall should allow it to conference, it shouldn't say
"Is blahblah.exe allowed to use H323 protocol?".

I'm not sure what the right approach is to resolving the issue, but I
think if you answer the majority of these questions with a sensible
default before the user sees the software, then at least you have a stab
at getting a considered answer when you do bother then with a question.

Or it should go off and speak to a knowledge base that says "executable
with this name, and checksum wants to use these ports to these
machines?", and get the answer from the authors (or even a majority of
users, or some experts, or their kid).

99%+ of users will never care if they are submitting a form over an
insecure connection, so why have I been asked if I care about this
hundreds of times? Because no one thought about setting a sensible
default? Similarly I don't care if a page has secure and insecure items
(just hide the padlock). Various software packages ask a whole load of
these questions, IE in W2003 was worst, but it is by no means a
Microsoft, or proprietary software preserve.

> Therein lies a need for a short course on 'Common installation 
> techniques'.

I think George at this point was saying people would have forked out for
their copy of Windows Vista, but I think that is the point, get the
money out of them before they hit the problems, and they'll feel more
motivated to continue (irrational human trait regarding sunk costs).

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