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Posts in 2008 November 21
Asus Says Windows and Linux Eee PCs Getting the Same Return Rate?
Asus’s CEO is grabbing headlines for an interview (which actually happened in late October) in which he stated that Windows and Linux Eee PCs are getting about the same return rate, contrary to what MSI and Canonical have said in the past. Really, though? There are four reasons why I doubt this is completely true.
- Asus’s CEO did not exactly sound sure. In the interview, he said this:
“I think the return rate for the Eee PCs are low but I believe the Linux and Windows have similar return rates.”
To me, that sounds like he was guessing, not stating an actual number - It would not benefit Asus to disclose their return numbers. No matter what the numbers look like, there is really no reason why Asus would want to say that one of their products gets returned a lot, unless they were actually going to discontinue the product.
- The is no real reason why the CEO should know anyway. Asus is a big company and Eee PCs are only a part of their business. Why should their CEO know specific numbers for return rates inside a specific product line, if Asus even knows what those numbers are.
- Even Canonical admitted Linux has higher return rates. If even Canonical says Linux is returned more, then it is highly likely that it is true across all netbooks. Plus, it makes sense that the unfamiliar product would be returned more.
Of course, the counter-argument would be that Linux on the Eee PC has been talked about so much more that it is not as much of an unknown as Linux is on other products.
Thanks to the power of Linux, there is a virtually infinite set of commands that can mess up your system and/or destroy your data. While I have never seen anyone advise someone else to run these commands, it is definitely a potential issue that a newbie could be told to run a command that would destroy his or her data and system. As demonstrated by this post, there are plenty of commands that are very hard to recognize, but will wipe out data.
Already, some Linux distros (such as Ubuntu) are putting stickies in their forums advising new users against running potentially malicious commands, but it is not realistic to think that everyone will read these stickies. So how can new users be protected against this possibility? A good step would be to add an additional layer of protection (in addition to sudo) that warns new users when they attempt to execute commands that are either common malicious commands (sudo rm -rf /, for example – don’t try it) or might destroy a large number of files.
This would be a simple step that could be taken as a preventive measure to ensure that no new users are greeted with a nasty suprise when they go to look for their files.