From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Aug 27 5:11:11 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from megaweapon.zigg.com (megaweapon.zigg.com [206.114.60.8]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A00CC15E1A; Fri, 27 Aug 1999 05:11:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from matt@zigg.com) Received: from localhost (matt@localhost) by megaweapon.zigg.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA03969; Fri, 27 Aug 1999 08:09:37 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from matt@zigg.com) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 08:09:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Matt Behrens To: Michael Robinson Cc: Jeff.Baker@acadhotline.net.au, stephen@math.missouri.edu, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Newbee In-Reply-To: <199908270528.NAA27601@netrinsics.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [This thread really doesn't belong in -stable. Followups directed to -chat, which I really must subscribe to one of these days. :-)] On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Michael Robinson wrote: : >Any unix like OS will have a steep initial learning curve, and there : >is a lot of learning to do. : : What is a "steep learning curve"? Where does that term come from? Picture this, if you will: A graph with two axes, the vertical being time and knowledge invested, and the horizontal being what you can accomplish. Obviously everything starts at zero. With any UNIXish system, you can expect that your first bit of learning you must invest will be more than you get out of the system. Therefore the line drawn as you invest time and learning knowledge goes upward steeply while travelling to the right slowly. However, the design philosophy of UNIX is quite ingenious, IMO. The curve will eventually start to flatten much more, so that you invest a lot less to accomplish more results. To contrast that, if you take a system like Windows NT your initial curve does give you quite a few immediate rewards right away, but you find as you go that your curve starts to steepen -- taking much more investment to accomplish the same thing. Eventually with NT you will also reach a point where you cannot do it at all and must rely on others -- this is where the beauty of open source OSs come in: if you care to invest, you can make your OS do *anything*. I'd draw a picture but this is ASCII mail... oh, heck, I'll do it anyway... just don't laugh. (And don't ask me what the learning curve is to draw ASCII graphs.) :-) | , | , . | ,. | UNIX- . , | . , | . , | . , -NT | . , |. , __|.________________ | HTH. (God, that graph really is terrible, isn't it?) :-) Matt Behrens Owner/Administrator, zigg.com Chief Engineer, Nameless IRC Network To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message