On Wed, 23 Jun 1999, Russell Nelson wrote:
> Every user interface should be dumbed down, so we can use our
> intelligence to solve other problems.
Ugh.
I'm not sure that, as a 27-year old person who never surfed the ARPANET, I
can reasonably do the "when I was young" thing, but ...
I have Cisco routers and switches that come with a web GUI. I'm taking a
Firewall-1 class this week and learning the pretty GUI. I hear there's a
GUI management interface for Solaris coming out soon.
But you know, in the end I don't know any GUI that I've ever used for
administration that lets me do all the things I can do through a CLI or
lets me do everything quicker. In general, GUIs disempower me. You simply
cannot take a complex system (whether it's a router, switch, UNIX
workstaiton, or MTA) and dumb the UI down without losing features or
ability to change behavior.
I'm not an NT administrator. I don't expect my products to behave like NT
workstations. I want a CLI, and I want to be able to do everything via a
CLI, and I'm quite content to have to actually spend some time *learning*
how to use my systems.
-roy
