Re: I can't beleive this
On Thu, Mar 11, 1999 at 02:40:35PM -0500, Michael Stenner wrote:
>
> Re: "They are willing to sacrifice fine-grained control for simplicity"
>
> But it shouldn't be an "exclusive or". As time has passed, I have come
> to respect the people who view computers as tools. They don't want to
> have to learn, they don't want to have to configure, and they don't want
> fine-grained control. They just want to run mathematica, or type some
> documents, etc.
This attitude is probably the biggest reason why the computer industry is in
it's current deplorable state. Go into just about any computer store and
have a look around. The vast majority of the products on the shelves are
complete junk. The sales people don't know anything about the products they
sell and the writers for most computer magazines know less than your
average 15 year old. Most of the Pentium based machines in people's homes
today don't even have any L2 cache (this isn't an issue with P2). We're
talking about a feature that costs the manufacturer maybe $15 and adds 30%
or more to the system's performance. Most newer systems are using a
motherboard/case design that is completely incompatable with aftermarket
motherboards in order to keep people from upgrading. Most of the bundled
printers can't even hold both their color and black ink cartridges at the
same time. No one who had even half a clue would buy such a thing and yet
these are the most common. Need more examples, how about Win-modems,
Win-printers, Win95 etc.
Frankly, I don't think the average consumer is qualified to buy a computer
in todays market and they sure as hell are not qualified to choose an OS.
> Now, if we decide that we are not interested in those types of
> users, that's fine. With a limited amount of resources, we might just
> decide that we'd rather put the time into other things.
Even now Linux makes a pretty nice pre-installed, pre-configured, remotely
maintained workstation. We still need to grow a bit more to encourage
hardware and software vendors to support us but that's already happening.
I think the best that we can do for now is to continue to build a solid yet
flexable base that appeals to the best and brightest from those other OS
camps.
> It is neither fair nor reasonable, though, to dismiss them as
> lazy. It is just not worth the time for some people to read docs or
> tweek config files when they don't have to. (And they don't with RedHat
> and Windows... at least, not as much)
Windows has become a big, complicated, unstable, unmaintainable mess. I
have yet to see a Win95 system that was more 6 months old and still working
properly. Sure people still manage to get stuff done but they also spend a
lot of time dealing with crashing programs, corrupt registries, "lost"
devices, and new programs breaking old ones.
The great thing about Linux is that it is so flexible that it can be used
to create very customized simplified systems (from the end user point of
view) using whatever harware makes sense for their particular application.
--
Ray
nmos@sonictech.net
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