Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 22:06:34 +0100 (CET) From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <20011102215135.A484-100000@howie.ncptiddische.net> In-Reply-To: <x8k7x8dioy.7x8@localhost.localdomain>
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On 2 Nov 2001, Gary W. Swearingen wrote: > But one must admit that when users had the choice of M$DOS or CP/M > or Mac or IBM or legions of Unix OSes, few could afford to choose one of > the technically better OSes. Do the test: Go out on the street and ask random people if they know what OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, BeOS or CP/M are. Ask the same people to define the term "operating system." Post the results to the forum, and let's interpret them to find out if users actually had the choice to get other OSes. I guess most won't know that there are alternatives, and if you don't know about something, you cannot use it. > With negligible exceptions, WinXP and Win2000 are as powerful and > flexible and "good" as any Unix OS, roughly speaking, of course. *VERY* roughly speaking... > It was fine when I was young and eager to exercise the power and > flexibilty and had a full-time Unix system administrator to do the > grunt work, but even if I enjoyed doing the grunt work (which I no > longer do), I find myself spending most of my available time doing > grunt work and have little time left to do more creative things or to > learn about more than poorly-documented system and network software. Half of what I enjoy about Unix is just doing that very grunt work. > Now, we will agree that a dumb GUI is actually less efficient than > use of a dumb config file. But we should be past all that by now. > GUIs should be smart. They can even be made to look exactly like > a dumb config file, but in fact be a kind of smart config file. > Good GUIs think for you. They check for typos and conflicts and > dependancies. They offer you choices so you don't have to remember > them. They make info and help available to you. Open up Microsoft Word. Type the folowing exactly as shown: "I cannot let a sentence start with a non-capital letter. here is the proof!" What you will realize: MS Word will convert the first letter of the second sentence into a capital letter, so that it reads "Here is the proof!. Now, you call that "info and help"? I call it thinking that all users are created stupid, because it seems as if MS doesn't want to give me the right to start sentences with non-capital letters unless I specifically change that in the options somewhere. > Developers of other OSes and their applications are putting lots of > effort into putting smarts into user interfaces so that users can use > their time to be smart about other things. You will not compete with > them if you only put your effort into the non-user-interface parts of > OSes and their applications. I guess that on FreeBSD with KDE or GNOME, you can put your effort into other, creative things. You can, however, also decide not to do that and instead play the game "the hard way". It's that flexibility that I regard as important. Greetings Nils (NOTE: I hope that this thread will soon come to an end, because it seems to be a complete waste of time. For my part, I will now only post replies if I really find it neccessary. Sorry for anyone who felt disturbed by me so far...) 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-advocacy" in the body of the message
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