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trewornan wrote:
Therefore if I could administrate a user's machine from afar via a broadband connection, we could get back to this model.Nothing personal (you seem a nice enough bloke) but that's a lot of trust don't you think?
There is a lot of implicit trust in using modern computers. Given the security model on most operating systems installing any software means you implicitly trust the author/supplier not to mess with anything else on the system. As someone who has earnt most of my living administering other peoples computers - yes it is sometimes a big responsibility, but at least the trust is explicit - you know who you give the root password to - you tend not to think twice when you type "rpm -i" or "apt-get upgrade". Perhaps we should make a market in such remote support by making the handing trust over explicit to the user each time they need support. The real battle is getting the amount of administration down, not who does it. The main problem with MS Windows is it's propensity to stop working like it use to. The main problem with GNU/Linux is to make it behave like you want to in the first place - after which is it pretty good at carrying on doing what you want - or enough of it to make a remote fix possible (although recently Debian unstable has been trying to disprove this - guess that is why it is called unstable).
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