Re: tlug: Caldera Japanese version (Clearification)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott M Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    >> Windows-style installers, you've confirmed.  It may be a good
    >> marketing strategy to catch Windows users, and I suppose that's
    >> a good thing.  But I won't recommend them to my mother (still a
    >> Windows user).

    Scott> would you recommend that your mother reinstall Windows,
    Scott> either?

Not for the fun of it, although sometimes it's necessary (her vendor
actually will do it I think 3 times in the warranty period for free
:^).  That's exactly the point.

    Scott> I think that Windows is getting off pretty easy in this
    Scott> whole argument, considering that most people never need to
    Scott> deal with its installer.  Linux gets this bad rap (and fBSD
    Scott> too) for being hard to use due to the installer, but...

As a former vendor, I can see that would bug you.  Especially given
that you specialize in installers and configurators.  :-)

That wasn't my point.  My point is that vendors who make it easy to
install Linux under current technology are like vendors who deliver
their browsers with executable MIME types enabled and ftpd et al all
preinstalled at boot time.  They're making a convenience vs. risk
tradeoff that the consumer is incapable of evaluating.  Then they
market on the basis of their convenience and say nit about security,
or hide behind meaningless C2 ratings of unusable configurations or
the fact that a Linux system _can_ be configured to be as secure as
any known system.

Ie, they lie about the risk to the customer.  IMHO, of course.  But I
don't take anything that such vendors say about their systems at face
value because I know they are not "whole truth" honest (or incompetent
to understand the risks, even worse), which surely casts doubt on
"nothing but the truth" honesty as well.

    Scott> Now, if you had a system with Linux preinstalled on it and
    Scott> you tried to *add Windows* to it, I think that would be
    Scott> significantly more difficult than the normal way of adding
    Scott> Linux to a Windows system... opinions?

The only way I can think of to do that safely is to add another drive
and install windows to it with the Linux host drive disconnected ;-)

VMware not considered, of course---that's cheating.  (And exactly what 
I plan to do.  (^^; )

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