Dude manages to erase the /usr/ folder on his Macbook and blames Apple for being so dumb. ⇒
24 April 2007, early afternoon
The best part is that Apple actually hides the /usr/ folder, and all the other important unix folders, when you browse around in the finder. This guy had to go out of his way to erase it. This link was found via Daring Fireball.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
When you have an OS with hidden stuff like that, you can’t really expect novice users who have never seen it or know about it to know of its importance should it ever become visible.
It would be so much better imho if they didn’t hide things. Whenever people try to hide things to ‘simplify’ things for the ‘novice’ user, then it just makes things frustrating for everybody else and eventually makes bigger problems like this for the ‘novice’ user as they learn. They should just not hide it and say “Hey don’t touch this if you don’t know what you’re doing”. And then try to educate the novice user so that they aren’t novice anymore, rather than keeping things dumbed down.
Then again, any regular account shouldn’t be able to just delete /usr. That’s just stupid.
And then to have the Daring Fireball laugh at him for his mistake is just another form of bigotry representative of the entire “Hey I bought into the Apple Hype™” community. Whenever somebody does something on a Mac that is slightly better/different, it’s all “OMG THAT’S TEH AWESOME”, and then whenever somebody screws up and does something stupid that you shouldn’t be able to do, then they’re all “OMG you idiot you can’t screw up a mac. You did it on purpose and can’t blame it on the <insert whatever Apple made here>.”
Aren’t Mac’s supposed to “Just work” as their commercials advertise?
by Iluvitar on April 24 2007, 3:30 pm #
He downloaded cocktail to muck around with his computer, and then cried when he broke it. And he writes a tech column. Dude.
I think an Admin account could erase the USR folder, if he typed in his password saying it was OK to do so.
by ramanan on April 24 2007, 3:59 pm #