Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 22:35:22 -0700 From: "Crist J. Clark" <cristjc@earthlink.net> To: Tim Ryder <jawse@yahoo.com> Cc: Adam <bsdx@looksharp.net>, Jason <jsmethers@pdq.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The joys of Windows Message-ID: <20000718223521.B677@pool1162.cvx20-bradley.dialup.e> In-Reply-To: <20000718195822.16555.qmail@web1304.mail.yahoo.com>; from jawse@yahoo.com on Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 12:58:22PM -0700 References: <20000718195822.16555.qmail@web1304.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 12:58:22PM -0700, Tim Ryder wrote: > The truth of the matter is that no matter what you are > using it is only as good as the person using it. If > you work faster in windows then you will beleive that > windows is better and the same goes for all the > others. > As far as you X environment you cant compare the > functionality in ice with windows. Of course you use > less ram when using ice, ive used ice and while it is > nice and quick, it does not support what Gnome or KDE > do, like drag and drop. > Everyone keeps saying that things are easier to do in > linux/bsd over windows and then they go on to say that > they dont like windows because all that you do is > point and click - isnt that easier. Almost never. The first time you use something it might be faster, but once you've used anything a few times keyboard is much, much easier. When using something like MS Word, do you still click Edit->Cut then Edit->Paste or do you C-c then C-v? Heck, when I sit in front of a Win machine I go for that silly Window button on the keyboard and fire through the start menu without the mouse... You should see the confused look of the lusers as they watch over my shoulder. I used to love it when they asked how I could use Windows on the second machine in my old office since it didn't have a mouse. The absolute worst thing about point-and-click the inability to automate repetitive tasks. I had to change a bunch of IP addresses on a set of machines. Couldn't find a way better than pointing and clicking through Windoze every damn time whereas for the UNIX machines it took me a few keystrokes to create a bunch of scripts to do the change and a couple more to run it on the machines. And don't start me on the fact I needed to reboot each Win box for the change to take effect. Had a point-and-click app strike me today, and the scary part was that it was not Windows, but a Solaris machine. I got a phone call from someone who wanted to print something from an application. The app produced some kind of file listing, and he wanted the output in the format produced by this app. However, the genius who made the app had put a "Print" button on it, but no way to control where it printed. It only printed to the default printer and my caller wanted to print it to a file. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to get a Slowlaris box to print to a file as a default printer (could I have ever convinced Windows to do that? Well, if you count spooling it to a BSD print server which then prints it to a file, I could have done it from Windows too), but it wasn't too tough. The moral of the story, to me anyway, is that point-and-click generally dumbs down, reduces configurability, and utility. If it had been a nice useful command- line program making his pretty output, he could just redirect it to a file, pipe it to a printer, whatever. I can't resist one more. The GUI log viewer on Firewall-1 is a pretty toy, but whenever I want to do any complicated searching through the logs, I always end up dumping the log as flat ASCII and getting to town on it with awk or perl. The GUI gets frustrating and limits what I can do. awk and perl are pretty much limitless. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@alum.mit.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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