On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 at 17:01, Frantisek Rysanek <frantisek.rysa...@post.cz> wrote:
> That's a good point, never thought about that :-) "This isn't my first rodeo." > > > Non-technical users (that is, most of them) would not know what to do > > with a Zip file. > > > Ooompfh! :-) :-) :-) > Clearly Mr. Proven you have much more experience with front-line > helpdesk work. Sadly, yes, I do. A long time ago, but it sort of stays with you. > Superficially I have to laugh at the idea that someone who cannot > work with a ZIP file would be interested to flash the BIOS in their > motherboard... Well, yes, that is fair, and Windows self-updaters are much more common now, but in this case, the OP did say that the vendor _said_ it was a FreeDOS tool. > And looking at my teenage offspring, insisting on sending > photoes from their phone into their computer by e-mail instead of > just using a USB cable Exactly. Or people sending you Word documents with an embedded PDF containing a TIF of a scan. >_< Part of this is the fault of bad design in software -- that it can _do_ this without asking, or that it was built so it looks like the obvious way -- and partly it is bad training. At my last job in the UK, I had to turn a long list of results into an Excel spreadsheet. Normally it took hours. I wrote a macro that did it. It ran in about 5sec. My colleagues looked at me as if they were considering burning me as a witch. Next, I was told to format a 50-60 page report by copy-and-pasting the formatting from an old one. I told them they were out of their minds not to use styles. They'd never heard of styles. So, I took the old report, saved and modified some style sheets, and did a demo where I applied them. The whole report, totally reformatted in seconds, multiple different ways. Now they were not going to burn me as a witch, but worship me as a powerful wizard or something. > (the largest asian mainstream brands) I have to say that their > download packaging people / download site maintainers generally > (insert your preferred invective verb) at their job. OK, I laughed at this point. :-) > I.e. I don't suspect some cunning plan, where plain sloppiness is a > good explanation. Hanlon's Razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor > I tend to actually shiver whenever I download some such stuff and the > archive format is a self-extracting EXE. Download a bare opaque EXE > from a website and just run it - such a barbarian practice, from a > security perspective! Agreed. > And by doing that, even if those EXE archives > are legit, they teach the users to consider this practice safe and > normal ! Absolutely. Many new Linux users get very angry when you tell them that downloading a binary and running it is the wrong way to install softwa. It is the only way they know. > It's always a pleasure to debate with you Mr. Proven :-) :-) > P.S.: as for updating BIOS from *FreeDOS* - suppose that you actually > get your hands on a DOS executable. It can be a single file (all in > one), or you get an EEPROM image data file and an executable flasher > util from the BIOS vendor. The actual executable flasher can have > whims of its own: > - can dislike FreeDOS, but run just fine in MS-DOS > - can dislike EMS/XMS memory managers > - can require an EMS/XMS memory manager > - can require a memory manager, but specifically segfault with JEMM > (= makes you revert to MS-DOS and himem-sys) All of those are totally believable. My default is no memory manager, nothing -- boot with F5 to skip CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT. But I believe you that some may need it. > > Combined with disk sizes and geometries, FAT32 support and possibly > other quirks of the platform, it can be an interesting exercise to > get a working DOS that pleases the flasher tool :-) I can believe that. Luckily I rarely need to do it any more. My home desktop is a Mac. > And then there are the modern EFI "firmware" generations that come > with a flasher tool in the form of an EFI executable, so you need to > know your way about the EFI shell, which hopefully is included in the > "firmware"... or boot an EFI shell as a "payload" from an > EFI-bootable disk drive or some such. Ouch. This I have not seen yet. > P.P.S.: my favourite download was an installer of some custom health > monitoring and GPIO API (for win32) from a PC vendor whom I would > prefer not to name. There was no information about compatibility, but > the contents were clearly original. The package installed without > errors. And after a graceful restart, the PC would end up in a BSOD > at boot, as soon as the kernel driver for that API got loaded. At > customer premises, without a recovery environment at hand... > We did not have another machine of that model to try on our own > first, so the customer ran the risk and served as a test pilot. Ahh > well. Fortunately he soon managed to plug the disk into another > machine, find the culprit driver binary and erase it from the disk. That's very nasty but I have seen similar behaviour. Windows' total failure to handle such things gracefully is one of the reasons I switched to mostly using Linux. It _tends_ (sometimes, not always) to handle things like device-driver failures in a more graceful way: e.g., dropping you to a command-line if it can't start the GUI, or giving you a standalone machine if the network fails, or working but at the wrong screen resolution, or something like that. Windows still tends to collapse on its face with a Blue Screen Of Death under such pressure. Life is too short, and one of the unspoken unpleasant truths of the computer industry is that Windows tech support people are a fungible commodity, with a market-controlled price. This means that most of them are not much use so they all tend to do things the simplest, most standard way (because that is all they know). That in turn means that you can easily hire them, in large numbers if needed because they are cheap, and if you have problems, you can fire them and hire other ones... and because your old techies didn't do anything fancy, the new ones will more or less understand the system and will be able to work with it. You don't really _want_ whizzkids on your staff: they will do fancy stuff nobody else understands. So this improves their job security -- they know you need to keep them. I was a Windows whizzkid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I saw the way things were going by the mid 1990s, so I left the business and became a journalist. Then the Web killed all the computer magazines, so I became a technical writer instead. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
