RE: A good charge against free operating systems
-----Original Message-----
From: Frédéric Aguiard <frederic.aguiard@swapcom.fr>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 11:03:06 +0100
Subject: RE: A good charge against free operating systems
> Hi !
>
> > My opinion is that if you don't care about
> > technical basics you shouldn't use a computer.
>
> IMHO, computers are mostly used as tools by a vast majority of people
> all
> around the world. But using a tool doesn't mean you have to
> understand or
> care about all the underlying technical issues.
>
> When I use a screwdriver or a hammer, I don't think about physical
> material
> resistance issues.
> Of course, I could break my screwdriver trying something too hard for
> it.
> But if I stick to a normal, basic use of my tool, it shouldn't break.
> And I
> souldn't have to care about all the technical basis behind it.
> In fact, my screwdriver is a very nice tool, indeed. Most of the
> time, if I
> do something foolish with it, let's say, use its stick as a hammer,
> it may
> not work very well (it's not what it has been designed for) but will
> not
> break either.
>
> You can't ask a secretary to understand all the complexity of a linux
> system. You can't even ask her to use a shell, nor anything like vi
> or latex
> or anything else. This is not HER job. She just needs a tool, a tool
> providing her what she needs for her daily work, a tool that does not
> break
> up in her hands while just using basis functions, nor doing something
> reasonably foolish.
I work as a sysadmin at a very large (merged) highschool, we have a
win2000 network here as well as some linux boxes (proxy) and a SCO UNIX
machine (student results machine).
I as an admin don't expect the users of the machines to understand
them, the choice of win2000 was made by the "management" after
consulting an expert (read: Microsoft certified business solution
provider or something like that)
I know for a fact that when you don't tell the users what they are
using, they wouldn't mind. The greatest example is when a secretary was
mumbling about how she read that unix was very difficult and impossible
to use she told me she was glad she didn't have to work with it. The
next day I told her that the administrational program she was using to
put the results in the database was accualy a telnet session with csh
with a progress database on a SCO Machine. I never told here that the
mail she gets and the pages she visits on the net all work because of
the linux gateway.
The point is ... when I would supply the next 100 machines with corel
linux and word perfect, the only thing the users would notice is that
we use wp again instead of the hated word.
** someone should really tell the world that the current linux
distributions accualy have a gui.
Ivo "vDong" van Dongen
PS. If my car won't work or needs an upgrade I take it to the shop....I
don't need to know what's under the hood....it should work as
I /learned/ to expect from it...
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