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Re: Soft ejects



Fish Smith <dyson_sphere_explorer@yahoo.com> writes:

> The bottom line is, it isn't appropriate for my
> machine to be making decisions as to whether it is
> appropriate to eject a dis(k/c) or not.  I should be
> making those decisions because the machine is
> unreliable and if I make a bad decision then I, as the
> user, am the one who has to pay for my ignorance.
(and not the poor machine, I suppose ;) ... )
> Many windows users are uncomfortable with this idea,
> and that is perfectly sensical. (don't think that word
> exists, but hey, opposite of nonsensical, right?) They
> ought to just stick to windows, the inferior system
> that doesn't let you make mistakes (or intelligent
> decisions) and instead makes them for you.

Whow, all those super intelligent admins here ... I for all have many
times forgotten to unmount the floppy before taking it out, not to
talk about the users in our computer pool. (If you as an admin had to
come and help out the following user who can't use the drive then,
like me, you would maybe think a little bit more differently about
that.)

> Unlike many others, I don't share the view that "linux
> needs to be made more newbie friendly."  Doing that
> will kill everything that made it great, and turn it
> into another Windoze.

I can't see how desktops like Gnome or others have taken away the
console from you, so you CAN both put in user friendlyness in the
system and have all Unix power remaining at the same time.

>                       I don't care if the entire
> world doesn't all use GNU systems, as long as I have
> them to get my work done.

But maybe without all this growing newbie user base GNU and Linux
wouldn't have developped as much as they do now.

>                           If somebody doesn't
> understand, I will be helpful and try to explain, but
> if they don't want to tolerate a system with a
> learning curve then they don't have to use it, and
> probably don't deserve to.  Leave this domain to those
> of us who do care to learn.

I wonder if 'learning' really involves to care about remembering
whether a floppy is mounted or not -- shouldn't using a computer
involve that it remembers just such stupid things for you? (Sure you
are using some scripts and cron instead of remembering all those
commands and tasks you seldomly has to do, aren't you?)

>                           There are times in Word when
> I need to use a lowercase letter /i/ as a word but it
> doesn't think I should.  This is precisely the reason
> we go to alternatives to M$, because M$ software
> always thinks it's smarter than we are and never is. 
> So don't go bringing M$isms to us and our
> alternatives, please.

(Talking about learning curves --) this is a user preference and can
be turned off (it's another question if it should be turned on by
default) -- you can have the same behaviour in emacs too.

I'm not pleading for 'more power to the machine, less for the user who
is knowing what she/he does', but I think my intelligence should be
allowed to concentrate on more meaningfull things as mounted or
unmounted floppies; but then there are things like autofs or other
'intelligent' programs which can take away those stupid tasks from me
-- let's work for making these tools (and their installation scripts)
more perfect, so these things don't bother us any more further on.

Greetings,
joachim


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