Re: For the morons

But the difference is that the idiots I speak of in the user side are
not because of bad UI's, or becuase of misunderstanding. These ones are
either completely untrained, or completely unqualified for the job.

How can you state that after saying

> Most software in the UI is designed poorly.

is the point I don't understand in your rationale.
If those users knew how to do their job without computers, but have trouble doing it with a particular software, or can do everything but the computer-related part of their job, then it's the software that isn't suitably designed. Period.

Everyone in their organization knows it too - they get ignored. But
coupled with software.. hey they can really screw stuff up inside the
company and cause really nasty issues.

So the key here is that the software introduced a fragility point.
That software can bring benefits doesn't absolve it.

Sometimes its a union job (yes in Europe many white collar jobs are
unionized including even software development). Other cases who knows
how they got it.

I know Europe, I'm french, the land of unnecessary strikes and ever annoying unions :)
If only one person can bring the whole system down, or make it useless by not understanding how to use it, then there is a design or UI problem.
Some users *will* enter invalid data, that's a given, just like developers will make bugs. Some more than others sure, but it's a given, and if there is no provision to handle that given, then there is a design or UI issue (depending on how deep the issue is rooted).

Case in point - a company I worked for had an idiot in it in our other
office. This person goofed up an NT box pretty badly trying to install
some ActiveX and they have screwed the registry etc.

Case in point indeed: you've just pinpointed the true culprits: ActiveX and the registry, and their underlying fragility.
If the only way a system can run is by making no mistakes, then it is a fragile system, waiting to be broken.

> No programming background what so ever.

I personally don't quite see why programming background would have to be required for installing software... You don't need intricate knowledge of mechanics to use a car, or change a tyre.

Registry and ActiveX are well known vulnerabilities of Windows software, if you want to avoid issues related to them, well, lock the box so they can't be tinkered with. I'm sorry to say that you made the choice of letting those vulnerabilities bite you, which makes you as responsible of the issue as the user who installed something he should have been prevented from installing.
Mistakes do happen, the unknown is not "if", it's just "when". Not having contingencies in place for when they will happen was an implicit choice, the end user was just instrumental.

Those of you dealing in domains deal with more intelligent competitive
people. In the non domain areas competitiveness is not so high, and
especially in the consumer area. Idiots abound. [...]

I'm sorry, but not that long ago we were dealing with users that didn't even knew how to manipulate a mouse, and for which double-clicking was a challenge (and they didn't understand french too well to boot), and at the same customer, there were a few wannabe hackers whose sole goal seemed to be finding a way to install games or send messages from their computers (btw, thanks MS for not making MSN Messenger truly uninstallable without arcane manipulations...).
You just learn to lock things up, make the UI solid, make the network layers protocols resilient to sysadmins mismanipulations, not rely on the registry for anything critical, not rely too much on system components susceptible of being broken by a security patch, etc.

Yet, all that doesn't mean the users are stupid.

Imagine (or remember) coding without exception frames?
Coding under an OS where one application bug can freeze the whole OS very easily? Not fun.
Same for users: UI, locking out of things they shouldn't touch, error tolerance are their exception frames, their OS process isolation.

When a single user can cause trouble on the whole system, it's a bit like writing code without a debugger, and where every bug you make could force a reboot or a reinstall. I'm pretty sure you would soon feel something *else* than love for such a system... ;)

Eric
.

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