Coercing users is never a good idea

Posted Jun 8, 2006 16:05 UTC (Thu) by ebirdie (guest, #512)
In reply to: Coercing users is *never* a good idea by bjanz
Parent article: Putting a lid on USB power

Hardware may be cheap, but data put into it isn't.

Secondly in my technopolitical experience many people would put data loss under their legitimacy Windows system to law of nature and data loss under a Linux system to untrustable technology, reputation damaged.

What comes to political correctness, at times Linux community is blaimed to follow Windows trails. Here I find it responsible as any other act put into fs- and block-layer to protect user's data (ata-drive cache issue comes to mind here). Although I admit, there will be fierce moments of frustration due to policy change unknown or forgotten at the moment of unusable USB-drive.

At the moment USB-drive doesn't mount it is very simple and inherent on Linux system to "dmesg | tail" and you are reminded and on your way to make it work. Well, some kernel messages leave space for better glue into the event/issue - at least to mere mortal like me.

Previous brings me to GUI, where I haven't yet found a configurable tool (window), which pops up when noticable things hapen in syslog as easily as manually doing "dmesg |tail" thus making a kernel message "usb-core: USB device not connected due to too high power requirement from USB-bus, change kernel policy or connect your USB device to external power." wipe away whole issue.