Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 09:24:04 -0400 (EDT) From: Jamie Bowden <jamie@itribe.net> To: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Microsoft brainrot (was: r-cmds and DNS and /etc/host.conf) Message-ID: <199709291321.JAA22447@gatekeeper.itribe.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970928005949.17419A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>
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On Sun, 28 Sep 1997, Annelise Anderson wrote: > My view is that configuration tools (and perhaps a menu of such tools) > are very useful and would make FreeBSD more readily accessible to > relatively new users. > > The problem with configuration utilities, whether they are GUI or > text-based, is that they put a barrier between the user and the > system, so that one may never really know what's going on. > > Actually Microsoft is not the worst in this; IBM is worse. And I > personally think that one reason (probably not the main one) for the > failure of OS/2 is that you can use that system indefinitely without > getting any idea of how it's put together, where things are, what file > to look at to find out what you did to it when you clicked on some > tab and chose an option. > > This veil of ignorance between the user/administrator and what's > really going on is not good, because when the GUI tool doesn't work, > you don't know where to go or what to do. The problem is that users don't understand that in OS/2, -EVERYTHING- on the desktop is a pointer to an object. I recently reinstalled OS/2 on my machine for no particular reason, and got back into it. I really like using OS/2, and can't understand how IBM managed to blunder that badly. They had a 6 month head start, name recognition, a superior product, and lots of money. Some marketing director somewhere is burning in hell. In the end, we come back to the point that computers are not tv sets, no matter how badly MS wants us to think of them as such. They are complex devices that are not only interactive, but can do multiple things simultaneously. Even in Win95 does this poorly, it still does it, and has some complexity to it. Users in general will refuse to learn anything about their computers unless forced to at gunpoint (which really pisses me off somedays). When I worked for a CS dept., I ran into this attitude there among students. How the hell does a CS student plan on getting a degree in a computer field without actually learning about a computer? What's worse is that some of them manage. The grad students were worse than the undergrads. Anyway, enough ranting for now. Jamie Bowden System Administrator, iTRiBE.net Abusenet: The Misinformation Superhighway
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