On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 03:13:48PM -0700, Andrew Plato wrote:
> I like to think of this as the "Mom" problem. My mom is a very
> intelligent, well-educated person. But she is not a computer person. She
> knows Outlook, IE, Word, a few basic programs and they allow her to be
> very productive and surf the web, buy stuff on E-Bay, send out letters,
> etc.
>
> If I sat my mom in front of a UNIX box she would scream in horror. It
> would take her months to re-learn everything. Well, most organizations
> have a lot of "moms" working in them and therefore they simply cannot
> just "throw away" their existing infrastructure because it has a few (or
> even a lot) of security holes. They must adapt that infrastructure to
> fit the needs of their users. That means patching holes as best they can
> and implementing systems to detect and catch attempts to exploit those
> holes.
You know, I hear the mom parable a lot, how a computer illiterate person
would run in horror from a *nix environment. Then I remember my mother
-- she's as computer illiterate as they come (program her vcr? yeah,
right!) and yet she has used elm [1] as her professional email client for the
last 15 years! Sure, her computing environment doesn't throw her at a
shell prompt; if I recall correctly, when she logs in she gets a little
menu where elm is one of her choices. And she's happy with this, it does
what she wants and it meets her needs.
[1] Never mind that elm is not a particularly good example of well-coded
open source software -- it had a y2k bug in it, of all things. :-(
--
Steve Beattie Don't trust programmers?
<steve@private> Complete StackGuard distro at
http://NxNW.org/~steve/ immunix.org
http://www.personaltelco.net -- overthrowing QWest, one block at a time.
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