Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 20:50:32 +0100 (CET) From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <20011102203830.U2905-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> In-Reply-To: <3BE2EF8D.4CB9A508@acuson.com>
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On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, David Johnson wrote: > People have difficulty with computers because they do lots of things in > lots of interesting ways. There are two ways I see of making them > easier. The first is to raise the computer literacy level of the general > public. The second is to start marketing specific purpose computer > appliances. I guess that a lot of the success the computer have had during the past years was also caused by them being general purpose items. In fact, I guess each office is now powered by computers because they have replaced typewriter, filing cabinets, the need to do manual calculations and charts, and to some extend even postal mail service. Furthermore, the question should really be asked all the way: Right now, looking at computers (no matter if FreeBSD or Windows), we have a few basics to learn, and once these basics are learnt, everything works more or less the same way. Microsoft says that if you can use *one* program of their office suite, you can, without much learning, use *all* of them. On FreeBSD, once you have realized how one command works, it's not much more than having a look at the manpage of any other command and see what options there are. In contrast, if we had one device for word processing, one device for creating spreadsheets, one device for databases, and so on, I guess not just would our offices be clogged up, but in the worst case all of these devices would look-and-feel entirely different, thus making them even harder to use. Looking at your example, I guess a combined car-boat-airplane would probably be rather easy to handle. Switch to car mode, use the steering wheel and the pedals and drive along. Put it into water, use the same steering wheel and pedals and you have a boat. It would work similarely when switching to airplane mode. Then again, a VCR or TV set are probably rather specific-purpose appliances, and yet there are numerous people who don't really know how to set their VCR's clocks or how to set stations on their TV sets. There are even people who are unable to get their digital watches switched from daylight saving time to normal time... For computers, the public probably needs to be educated, and at the same time the system can be made easier to use for them. KDE and Gnome seem to try to achieve that in the Unix world. I'm never against such methods of making devices easier to use, as long as the flexibility which is important to advanced users is not being sacrificed. Greetings Nils Nils Holland Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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