4 ms·
Equating killing someone to using an old OS is a terrible straw-man argument.
by Jimmie 14y ago
Equating killing someone to using an old OS is a terrible straw-man argument.
- ricardobeat 14y agoIt's not a comparison. Maybe I went a bit too far, but I think it answers "why does no one want to actually answer his question?". Sometimes the subject at hand or the content raises flags/concerns that overshadow the question. It's human nature.
- statictype 14y agoIn which case, don't answer the question at all. If a person is completely new and this is obvious from the question, then you might be helping by saying "don't do that", otherwise, you're just adding noise.
- ricardobeat 14y ago> If a person is completely new and this is obvious from the question That seems to be the case. It's obvious that wanting to run a modern browser on Windows 3.1 is completely naive, hence the responses.
- sukuriant 14y agoNo, I'm sorry. When you believe that someone is going to harm themselves or others with their decisions, and no one else has mentioned the dangerous of their intentions, it is the kind thing to do to warn them. This is especially the case here. This person wanted to do something clearly dangerous and with a critical system (see critical systems testing) that could potentially encourage it to fail and cause lives to be lost. They needed to be warned. Not answering when there is great danger is just as cruel as answering with the help to make it happen because yes, someone will help.
- yew 14y agoIt's completely reasonable to warn them. It's not reasonable to post yet another warning in a thread consisting entirely of warnings and no answers. It's possible that they don't know what they are doing. It's also possible that you don't know what they are doing. In this case, for example, it looks like the time clock software actually interfaces with the saw controller. If you feel this level of risk aversion is unacceptable - well, I hope you have a better argument than what's been posted so far.
- sukuriant 14y agoI don't, which is why I didn't add anything. Actually, the accepted, official answer was more than perfect. People rambling the same things isn't helpful, you're right; however, had no one said anything as useful as the accepted answer, then it would have been helpful to warn them. We were speaking on different wavelengths, I hope that clears it up
- dbecker 14y agoOn behalf of people who might be operating the $150,000 bandsaw, I appreciate the responses that addressed the bigger picture safety issue.
- lukeschlather 14y agoThe issues have very little to do with the age of the OS. If someone was asking how to get Firefox running on an embedded Linux machine operating a saw, I would expect most people to be saying roughly the same thing: Don't mess with a sensitive piece of software, buy a dedicated machine to run your timecard system.
- astrodust 14y agoBand saw. Windows 3.1. If that isn't a killing machine, I don't know what is.