From Phil Greenspun:

I'm not going to say who it is because he'd be embarrassed but perhaps the incident reveals something general: people over the age of 25 shouldn't use Unix/GNU/Linux/whatever, unless they are full-time professional Unix sysadmins. The dialog boxes on WinXP are annoying but for those of us nearing 40 perhaps it would be nice to have the computer ask "Are you sure that you want to overwrite all the most critical files on this machine?"

Maybe that's another vote for Mac OS X? :-)

Posted by jzawodn at July 19, 2003 08:34 AM

Reader Comments
# Jon Gales said:

I double the OS X vote. There's nothing like being able to have all the Unix toys but still be able to run Photoshop and NetNewsWire (although Windows users don't know what they are missing with NNW). The best of both worlds.

on July 19, 2003 09:29 AM
# Travis said:

Yes, exactly why OS X is for me. Unix capabilities and flexibilities but without all the sysadmin'ing. I've other things to do.

on July 19, 2003 06:18 PM
# anode said:

Well, he was logged in as root. Same thing could happen on OS X also (sometimes I pop into the Terminal to deal with a tarball that Stuffit's being bratty about, not as root though ;) .)

on July 20, 2003 04:17 AM
# Dan Isaacs said:

Yes, but the most horriofying unintentional deletion of files happened to a 20 year old, conerning a pron.tar file.

on July 20, 2003 06:58 AM
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