At 02:33 PM 3/11/1999 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
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>On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 14:40:35 -0500 (EST), Michael Stenner wrote:
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>>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.
>
> I have no respect for those people. Yes, a computer is a tool. But
>lets drop in a few other examples.
>
> Say... a car. A car is a tool. People don't want to learn, they don't
>want to have to learn how to drive, they certainly don't want stick shifts.
>Wait, they don't want to learn how to drive... Well, do you want to be on
>the road with those people? I don't.
A more apt example would be that people don't want to change their own oil,
replace head gaskets, and do their own tune-ups. I can see three levels of
comparison:
1) Driving a car would be, in my opinion, more like running the software
(knowing how to save a file or print a document, etc.
2) Doing auto repair would be like doing sys admin stuff (setting up
smb.conf and getting printing to work, etc.
3) And building auto parts/custom modifications would be like
programming.
Redhat seems to have done a good job of taking the role of mechanic and
left the driving to the user; Debian tends to expect the user to be the
mechanic also. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; I just think the
original car example needed some modification.
