On September 23, 2003 06:07 pm, yankl wrote: > On Tuesday 23 September 2003 02:43 am, John Wilson wrote: <snip>
Oh my. :-) > John sorry by by your logic you set a person, with no previous knowledge, > in a car and tell him to drive. Not only that, but you put him in the > middle of car rally. Before you can walk you need to crawl. Unfortunately, > for some unexplained reason we all start assuming that Joe Sixpack must be > able to write C++ code with no training at all, why? To drive a car one > need to have drives license because one can be one can put 100-1,000 people > in a danger. By running web server one can put 100,000-1,000,000 people in > danger. (It looks like it is over statement but what if virus gets to some > atomic lab for example.) Reread what I said and it said that you don't put an untrained person into the seat of an automobile give them the keys and say drive. (Though I'd say a larger percentage of drivers learned exactly that way than we'd care to think.) Reread what I said about setting up a web server for internal use on a private at home network. Carefully reread that I noted that one should close down all incoming attempts at Port 80 connections. Perhaps it was a bit flippant for someone who isn't born to English but that is what I said. I also said that by getting a page up quickly and with as little hassle as possible adults will then dive into it with quite a bit of vigor and, perhaps one day, even read the man pages. As I noted, they're still not likely to understand them but then again, they won't need them either. I'm NOT suggesting that one can walk without crawling. What I am suggesting, and what every good parent does, is to remove the roadblocks to crawling and taking those first steps wherever they can. By the same logic you seem to suggest tossing a nonswimmer into the 20 foot end of a pool and say "swim" which is exactly what RTFM is. > > The m$ world was originally created to provide complicated tools to average > consumer. Look where it brought us too. Bits of programming stupidity like allowing HTML, .exe, .pif, active X, javascript and java to freely execute on the "Active" desktop, in Outlook, M$ Office and soon brought us where it did in terms of security. Please also remember that the development of the PC world from way back in Altair days to the present have a huge debt to the amateurs who contributed to it. This includes Linux which also, BTW, has easy to use graphical programming tools available. For goodness sake. One form or another of these has existed in the PC world since Turbo Pascal. > > Simplification of the computer use could be done with in two schemas. > One is to hide from user a complexity of process, or m$ way. Click on this > icon and your IIS web server will start in background. By this logic, yankl, you're suggesting that Mandrake shouldn't offer to install servers in their installation prigram till after we've all signed something to say we know completely how to use it? A person can install all kinds of servers, including a firewall, even on the download version. And a lot of them will come up running as soon as you boot it. > Another with education. Read 800 page book and you would be able to setup > Apache. No adult in their right mind will read an 800 page book to learn to post a simple web page. No properly written book would even suggest such a thing. > By design *NIX are falling in second schema. RTFM is a call to read > documentation. For a wile we where a colleague, I thought language to > adults and before they could read words they started from studying > alphabet. It is impossible to combine two schemas sines they are mutually > exclusive. Hence, if one like simplicity and does not like to read > documintation, s/he dangerous to *NIX world. Because, s/he drug us close to > the cliff of m$ pit fall. Actually *NIX is in niether camp that you describe. It revels in its complexity, which is a good thing. However if you turn someone loose with the man pages and HOWTOS, which, as I've pointed out are old, misleading to downright wrong then you are setting them on the road to disaster. The teaching of language isn't a bad example but it isn't a good one either. For me as an english speaker to learn french it is not necessary to study the alphabet because we use the same one. What is difficult is non-English concepts like the gender of words, the notion of regular verbs which are scarce in Engish and the importance of word order which is vital to english but not as vital in French. To the extent of the cultural notions of a different language you're correct. However in most language courses one learns to say Hello, John or Bonjour, Jean before diving in too deeply. Ditto for all programming manuals I've ever read which invariably start off with some version of "Hello World!" becore diving much deeper. Finally, simplicity in computing does not exist. Even MicroShaft doesn't buy into that one completely. The alleged journalists at places like CNet or ZDNet might be stupid enough to think that but practically no one else with any experience does. But for documentation to be of any value it has to start out without assuming anything and bring a user along slowly but allowing them to build things on the way. In that sense, in a wood shop, you start off with something very simple long before you are ever set loose on a lathe or build complex cabinetry. Every journey begins with a single step. The key to teaching adults is to get them to take that step on their own. After that, it isn't anywhere near the battle you seem to want to make it. ttfn John
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