On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > victor rajewski writes: >> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> >> wrote: > >>> You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.) >>> >>> If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good >>> enough to be forced on other people. >> >> That would be like expecting gnome/OSX/windows developers to use >> the GUI exclusively without using the command line. The GUI is for >> a particular set of users, power users and developers might need >> something else. A 10 year old student and a tertiary educated software >> developer will have different needs from a file system. > > I don't know about gnome developers, but as for OSX and windows, > yes they definitely do work exclusively in the GUI. I've seen it > with my own eyes for Windows. (creepy!) I have to assume that > pre-OSX developers didn't use a command line, because there > wasn't any command line at all.
True. I guess my point is there are aspects of the OS that 'normal' users see, and aspects that they don't need to see. >> Gmail and delicious (and no doubt others) use a tag-and-search system; >> they both work great for me, and if a similar functionality existed >> for my regular filesystem, I'd use it in a second. > > Gmail is tolerable (barely) because email is mostly searchable text > and because Google throws a massive compute farm at the problem. > On the XO, we have mostly non-text and no compute power to spare. Non-text is not the issue - that's what the tags are for. >>> Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about >>> his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev, >>> look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it? >> >> No, just like you can't do this in OSX using just the GUI. That's what >> the terminal is there for. > > I can do that with GNOME, KDE, and Windows. While I think bash is > wonderful, forcing people into it just to view files is no good. /dev, /etc, on windows? hidden away into the API and registry. Abstractions/layers. They're everywhere in the OS; that's what the OS does. >>> Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it, >>> and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you >>> do not really use it. >> >> This is the tricky part - we are not the intended audience of the >> journal/sugar. The intended audience is school kids. We need to be >> looking at how they use it and if it suits them, not if it suits us. > > This bothers me greatly. I'll do my best to explain, but it isn't > all that easy. > > Perhaps you've heard of "the soft bigotry of low expectations". > You're... looking down on the kids when you decide that they can't > use the same thing as yourself. They get toys, not tools. > > I can agree that some of the more complex stuff should be out of > the way by default. The journal is more than that though; it makes > the more complex stuff simply unavailable. It also encourages a > mental model that is not in line with reality. The result is a > limit to how far a kid can advance. I understand where you are coming from. I personally don't have a problem with using sugar/the journal since I'm happy to use the command line when I need it, and so can the students. But throwing a student in the deep end will not do them any favours; they'll just get scared and switch off. In the broader sense, I don't really understand what you mean by a 'mental model in line with reality'. Do you mean a filesystem that mirrors existing filesystems? A filesystem that models a physical filing cabinet-folder-file system? Just to do something because that's what we've always done is not ideal; this is a chance to try something different. With more powerful computers and increases in storage space, OS designers have been trying to re-define filesystems, but have been hamstrung by the need/expectations of backwards compatibility. The way we think about information is changing. vik _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep