Hi List! My users complained a couple of times, so here it is:
When they use a default gnome desktop, and copy some files (maybe recursively hundreds) from a cd to a folder then the files become read-only. (Technically: they'll have a 444 mode). This is a very bad default. Sometimes it is ok, for example movies, but a lot of times these are .doc files. And my users are absolutely non-technical, so right click, properties, etc. is way more than they'd do before calling support. They actually usually don't know what that orange thingy is on an icon, they open the file with openoffice, and they see that they can only select parts with the mouse, but not edit the document. Then they call me... And one other thing: maybe cli is bad, but if everybody would know a bit of the cli, I could easily say: give it a -R, and that's gonna make it recursive. Now that we think of cli as the worst evil on earth, now the only thing I can say: "Yes, sure, you need to traverse the whole structure, and for all the 600 files you need to click properties, then...". So usually I simply do it instead of them, and say in the phone: "ok, this is a fault of the computer, not yours, I corrected it"... (In the thread grown from Linuses mail a system "that just works" is a quite often mentioned principle. Well, this issue has something to do with that, I think :)) Best regards, Baldvin _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
