Robert:
#ifdef FLAMES
I can say that I haven't had the time/opportunity to convert fortran to c. I haven't ever programmed in fortran and my C experience is limited to textbook exersises and a few other smalltime projects. Perhaps these differences are not significant when deciding if _I_ am "highly knowledgable" or not.
#endif
My Gentoo installation experience is quite contrary to yours, no problems, no lost sleep...
Clearly programming knowledge isn't a prerequisite for installing Gentoo.
However I must say the docs I followed during the installation where essencial. They were also easy to find and easy to read. (Congradulations Sven, Daniel, Chris and Jerry)
Clearly Ciaran's arguement about having to "read the users manual" and educate yourself as a user is valid.
The question boils down to whether or not computing should require a user to educate (him|her)self and to what degree. That depends a lot with what he/she intends to do. I have a 2 year old that "uses" a computer (she sits on it and presses the power button repeatedly). It happens that before long she will probably want to do more with it.
There is an equilibrium between programmer time spend on insulating the user or implementing usability ie functionality. Linux programmers clearly volunteer their time to do something they enjoy.
Clearly 90% MS users use about 10% of the available features. The other 10% of MS users probably use more than half of the features available, And maybe those 10% don't necesserily need a GUI to do it; I can even say that configuring IIS is not more intuitive than configuring Apache. The GUI serves only to provide some cryptic system of windows and buttons that have to be selected and manipulated in a certain (special) way. The Apache configuration requires only that you RTFM and get used to editing a text file.
Clearly if proprietry software can offer a more user friendly interface then the 90% of the users are going to get some utility from it with less manual reading time, and as a marketing strategy using programming resources in such a way is strategic.
I think linux has a friendly interface. I love the CLI, I don't have to issue kernel signals by hand, I do so because I want to. The documentation is very good. I can get my hands as dirty as I want to. For the price I pay it is an excellent value. I can learn the nitty gritty by joining a mailing list.
That's my 2 cents worth for this thread.
Thanks
Leo
Robert G. Hays wrote:
Here I have to -- mostly! -- agree with Eric...
I am a highly-knowledgeable ~18-year programmer, multi-lang, multi-arch, even was handed 66x lins low-comment Fortran, which I'd never seen (Fortran) before to convert to C, no headers, books, etc. Not only succeded in ~12 hours, but noticed & fixed two errors that the client had paid several $10K's to supposed Fortran-pros trying to find & fix!
Oh!, and I have been doing Linux moderately seriously for ~3 yaers now, lightly (~= noob) for almost a decade before that..
I have now spent 8 *Full* days trying to get gentoo to install in the first place, and still have 80x25 consoles & 640x480x16-color... This not learning, this is abusive. I think gentoo will be worth it once I finally get it running fully, but this is so far beyond ridiculous that ridiculous doesn't even point in the right direction any more.
Having said all that, I also understand, at least in part, why this is so. (Don't jump *too* hard there, Eric!)
And I am preservering in spite of all, because "Wunnerful-hic!-winders-HIC!" is crashing every 15 minutes or so, SuSE 9.0Pro can't compile its own *matching* kernel (& yes, I *do* know how to do that), Mandrake 10.1 can't either, & neither company seems interested in getting or keeping me as a customer & unpaid salesman, and various things I have moderately-reliably heard about Xandros & Linspire & Slackware make me doubt they will do all I intend to do once Linux is running, for various reasons.
Meanwhile I need to maek money or get evicted from my home, and between MonopolSoft and Gentoo, right now I can't do a d****thing to make money.
So Eric *Does* have a valid point, Ciaran.
Sorry for the complaint, but this needed to be said.
Thx, rgh.
Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 14:57:31 -0400 "Eric S. Johansson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
| > Having listened to said usability experts and found that all the
| > software that I like completely breaks at least five of their seven
| > heuristics, I wouldn't be inclined to take them too seriously...
| > Their main premise seems to be that "learning is bad". | | I think I understand. The usability experts were using a language not
| common to geeks.
The problem is that the usability experts are (deliberately) thinking like the average computer illiterate man on the street, rather than considering the idea that maybe it's best to have to learn how to use powerful, expensive equipment.
| if you listen to them with the ears of taxi drivers, insurance agents,
| doctors, salesman (i.e. 99.99 percent of the world), you'll hear them | say that you should not surprise users. Behavior should be
| consistent, don't hide interface elements, let there be multiple ways
| of finding the same operation (open file versus get file). There is
| a whole list of things to do and not do. The Macintosh does a
| phenomenal job at being a good user interface most of the time.
I've used OSX. It's horrible. The entire operating system is designed to
hide as much as possible of what's actually going on, and instead
presenting it in hugely flawed metaphors.
| Unfortunately their errors are quite glaring and persistent.
And when the metaphors break down, the users are utterly screwed, even if they *do* have a technical background, because they've been trained so hard to think in terms of these daft metaphors. Oh, and don't expect any help from technical people either, because they can't get the information they need or do the things they need to do because it's all hidden behind broken abstractions.
| If you want to see how bad things are, try telling a naive user to | type what you want them to type. Corrections only come after they | have completed typing what you just said. Welcome to my world.
Which is why naive users shouldn't be unleashed upon computers without some kind of training first.
| > And if you don't want | > to learn, you're using the wrong distribution... | | like I said there is learning and there is scar tissue. Learning | serves a purpose, scar tissue is just hazing. so, is gentoo about | hazing or being useful?
It's about being useful. In order for it to be useful, you need to learn how to use it. Given a choice between giving the user power or making things easy for a user who isn't prepared to spend a few minutes learning, we make things powerful.
Did I mention that vim is the pinnacle of user interface design?
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