Re: A Personal Defense -- for the record

[Alan Shutko <ats acm org>]

Benjamin Sher <sher07 bellsouth net> writes:

> Can you imagine what it must be like for a new user to turn on his
> RealPlayer and find out it's dead on arrival?

Yes, it must be thoroughly crushing.  It must eat away at them as they
try to sleep at night.

A couple points:

* New users don't have RealPlayer, and won't suddenly see it broken.
  RH6 doesn't come with it, so they won't have it.  If they download
  it and it doesn't work, why should they assume it's RH's fault,
  instead of Real's? 

* Experienced users (those who had a previous RH install) may have
  RealPlayer, but if that's the only thing broken in the install, most
  are probably happy!  Do you remember the troubles of RH5?

* Solutions to this problem abound.  In 5 minutes on Dejanews, I found
  an RPM in RH contrib to fix it.  

> 5) I downloaded WordPerfect and with the very generous help of Jan
> Carlson and especially Ray Curtis, learned how to make it work. It
> wasn't easy. It installs fine but does not work automatically. You
> need a special shell script to make it work.

No, you don't.  It works fine on my machine without any such script,
and I've not heard of any such scripts on the corelsupport
newsgroups.  Perhaps you're referring to a script in /usr/local/bin to
call it from its install location?

> Even if that were true, is it not Red Hat's responsiblity to provide
> that basic security for him/her, not to leave him/her without so
> much as a hosts.deny and host.allow script. 

The problem is that then, users will complain that various services
they install don't work.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats acm org> - Looking for a job in Long Island!
Check http://rescomp.wustl.edu/~ats/ for a resume.
What causes the mysterious death of everyone?