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Re: Stupid users (was Re: Is there a term for this?)
Subject:Re: Stupid users (was Re: Is there a term for this?) From:Phil Snow Leopard <philstokes03 -at- googlemail -dot- com> To:"techwrl (techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com)" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:03:14 +0700
On 11 Feb 2012, at 00:33, McLauchlan, Kevin wrote:
> And anyway, if people are dumb enough to write anti-employer,
> anti-boss, anti-cow-orker diatribes on the company computer,
> connected to the company network... (one of the examples
> intended to show how bad the Lion features are) aren't those people also kinda too dumb to hold a job?
I think those might be just the kind of "stupid users" Apple's new system is aimed at, so as you can see it fails them from the off... :p
More seriously, and as I said, those were 'fanciful' scenarios intended only to illustrate a point. Since some people seem to be getting caught up more on the scenarios than the points being made, let me put it this way. With Lion:
1. *You* are not in control of your computer, the OS is. What it saves, when it saves it, what appears on your screen and when it appears are out of your control.
2. *You* are not in control of what is stored on your computer. As someone said earlier, you can strip out history of a document by creating a duplicate and deleting the original. But that deletes ALL your history (what if you only wanted to delete one mistake or one (in)sensitive draft?); more to the point, that is *more* "difficult" than simply giving users the option to turn autosave on and off.
3. Lion is *hugely insecure* — give me a Lion-enabled Mac and in 15 minutes and I can get past all your admin passwords and any firmware password you have set. Having done that, I can access your document revisions folder and see/copy/print every edit you ever made to any document created in a versions-enabled programme. Your only defence against No.3 is FileVault 2 (so if you're using Lion, be sure to use FV2 if you have ANY personal data on your machine). However, be aware that FV2 won't work in many situations, and you need to be an Admin user to set it up (comprehensive info about FV2 here: http://www.macworld.com/article/162999/2011/10/complete_guide_to_filevault_2_in_lion.html).
I willingly agree some people might not care about 1, 2 and 3, but many others do. What I have elsewhere called Apple's "triumvirate of data guardians" (Autosave, Versions & Resume) are imagined for a very limited user ecology (what I would call "the light home user"), and that is not really characteristic of a large part of Mac OS X's existing customer base (pre Lion anyway).
Hence, as I said right at the start of opening this thread, Apple is taking a new direction with Lion, aiming for the "simplest" of user ecologies. For long time Mac users who've gotten used to the power and versatility of the Mac, that's a real shame because there simply isn't anything on the market that is anywhere near as powerful or reliable as Snow Leopard running on an Intel Mac.
