The Wright brothers used a catapult. Alberto Santos-Dumont's 14-bis took off on its own.
The point being? Modern jet fighters are catapult-launched off aircraft carriers.
The Wright Brothers were three years earlier, and were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight. That makes it hard to sustain the claim that Dumont was "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane" (as claimed in the post I responded to).
They were working in secrecy
For their first successful flight on Dec 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers invited everyone living within five or six miles. Not many attended because of skepticism, and the winter weather.
They asked their father, in this telegram, to inform the press, although it was over a year before the information appeared anywhere. For interest's sake, here's the text of the telegram:
Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas . Orevelle Wright
I'm sure if they could have posted on Slashdot at the time, they would have.
Santos-Dumont made a point of inventing for the benefit of humankind
Good for him. So you're saying that Dumont has some kind of moral advantage, but that doesn't change who achieved it first.
What are you talking about? Dumont's first flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle, as opposed to a balloon, was three years after the Wright Brothers. He could have just sent off to them for the plans...
You're building a standard for your company's next product
Well, if you're building it on your own, without anyone else knowing about it, then it's not a standard, is it? Unless you're talking about internal company standards, in which case you can do what you like, just don't expect the rest of the world to accept it. The point is that to increase the chance for your product to be widely accepted, it helps to conform to agreed-on standards. What's so complicated or confusing about that?
The underlying issue that I think you're missing is that you only need standards when the product you're creating is just one of many similar alternatives. If you had a truly innovative product, you wouldn't need any standards, you'd just create your own. Take Dean Kamen's Segway, for example. He didn't have to come up with an open standard for a gyroscopically stabilized two-wheeled human transporter - he just invented it and patented it (although he still runs afoul of road use standards, but that's a different issue).
So, if you want to be creating your own standards, you have to actually invent something, not just manufacture the same recycled pap that the company down the road is creating.
Re:There have always been 2 types of engineers
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 2
I think your post is spot on. One thing that I think you miss is that the SEI et al have perfectly valid, understandable reasons for their goals. Once things have been invented and pass into the realm of everyday life, there is a fairly important societal need for everything to be predictable. There are 300+million people in the US who need their services to run properly and continue to do so, etc., and the same goes for any other developed country.
The problem, and where the SEI attitude falls down, is that it's very difficult to draw a bright line at the point where innovation is no longer needed. The truth is that in a sense, innovation is needed everywhere, in different measures and different kinds. So you're correct that the attempt to impose uniformity on everything can have a horribly stifling effect, and we see this in large corporations all the time. The biggest difference between small and large companies, and the reason why large companies still buy up small ones, is because the small ones have the freedom be original - the large ones, mostly, don't.
I think we could do a much better job in these areas, but's it going to take some innovators to reform the system. This is hardly original, but the biggest problem is that the people who understand the value of these things are not the pencil-pushers who run things, and all the pencil-pushers ever want to know is where their next quarter's revenue is coming from.
However, I don't think innovation has slowed to a crawl at all - there's a lot of interesting stuff happening, all over the place. One problem is that at the consumer level, a sort of plateau has been reached, where much of what a consumer would want is already available, and it's just refinement from here on. I mean, cellphones with built-in PDAs, PDAs with built-in cellphones, HDTV, media convergence, woop-de-do. Most of it isn't very life-changing. We're stuck in a local minimum, or something, and it'll take a big invention to get out. (I want my flying car!:)
It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
On the plus side, if you actually achieve something, many of those mindless majority will adore you with almost the same fervour usually reserved for Britney Spears. Hmm, a little scary, that. Perhaps that's why there are problems with innovation...
Re:What are we building, anyway? CIRCUITS!
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 2
Now there's the third world so-called 'software engineers'.
C'mon, you CPU hardware guys haven't come up with anything new in, like, decades. One guy came up with the transistor - props to him. Some other guy came up with the CPU - good work, that man. Then after that, all you little clone drones carried on just making the same thing over and over, getting smaller and faster on each iteration. Kinda like the Swiss watchmakers. Ooh! It's a millimeter thick, and it still tells time exactly the way the one we made 200 years ago did! Woohoo!
The least you could do is come up with a decent silicon-level execution model (Von Neumann is so twentieth-century) so us parasitic trend-followers don't have to waste our time dealing with a teensy array of "registers" and the like. I dunno, native chip-level lambda calculus support might be nice, for a change.
Anyhoo, wake me up when you guys actually come up with another invention, willya?
Ironically, through it's MSDN plan,. microsoft has a good history of doing this, whether it is through the releasing of api specs or file formats, there isn't much they don't provide. That said what they don't provide is often telling.
I realize I'm preaching to one of the choirleaders, but as someone who switched away (a number of years ago) from being very involved with development on MS platforms, my perspective is that although MS does provide a lot of useful and well-organized material on MSDN, what they don't provide is not only telling, but can be crippling for a developer.
Microsoft goes out of its way to "strategically" hide and obfuscate things that it considers to provide a competitive edge, or things that it thinks may reflect badly on the company. It repeatedly and consistently takes action based on its own most narrow interpretation of its self-interest (forget about enlightened self-interest - a foreign concept to Microsoft).
I think what Microsoft has missed in the larger sense of assessing its own actions and policies, is that a software company like Microsoft is not like companies that sell other kinds of products. It relies on developers who commit large portions of their time to working intimately with their products. In a sense, every developer who uses Microsoft products should be considered an MVP, in the sense that they should be given access to information that helps them do their jobs without needless frustration and deliberate stonewalling and delaying tactics.
Microsoft is not the only closed-source software company that has problems in this area, but it's certainly the most prominent. In that position, it's in their own interests to try to do a better job. Microsoft showed no inclinations in this direction until open source began threatening its business model. What Ballmer is saying reflects the first time in a long time that Microsoft has actually said something that essentially translates to "we have to do a better job of providing real value to our customers".
Microsoft and its customers owe a tremendous debt to open source for that kick in the pants. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft is actually capable of delivering the value it's talking about.
Crichton's a smart guy, but he's not that far ahead of his time. Back in the 60's, they used active seismometers on the moon, which detonated charges to create shockwaves in order to measure the depth of the regolith (outer layer of loose rock & dust). The 3D imaging bit is newer, but people have also done things like use the vibrations from earthquakes to measure the size and rough shape of underground cavities.
Aw, dammit, Bruce. Here we are all caught up in RMS's apparent megalomaniacism, and you whip out an actually halfway decent reason for calling it GNU/Linux.
Bruce did not provide a reason, let alone a halfway decent one. He made two unconnected statements. There's no connection between calling it "GNU/Linux" and the fact that people are trying various things to encumber Linux's freedom. No connection whatsoever, except in Richard Stallman's mind, and in the minds of those who wish to curry favor with him or remain in his good books.
Stallman should apply his legendary mind to his own actions, and possibly see a therapist about this obsession of his if he is not capable of overcoming it on his own. That would truly be good for the community.
Thanks, I just noticed that in another message, which quoted the actual emacs changelogs where "lignux" was used.
I'm a little disturbed that my brain was able to follow the same patterns as Stallman's in this respect... Maybe I heard it somewhere and remembered it subconsciously, yeah, that's the ticket!
The problem with GNU/Linux is that "all of the folks out there" tend to be sensitive to little things like catchy names, brand identity, etc. "GNU/Linux" is the answer to the question "how can we confuse and annoy the user base?"
The FSF would have as much chance of succeeding if it asked the community to start calling it LiGNUx. (Hope I'm not giving anyone any ideas.)
I suggest that the real solution is for the FSF to do what many other organizations with unpalatable names have done, and change "GNU" to something less klunky. In this particular case, even an off-the-shelf marketdroid who boasts of being able to "think outside the box" might actually be able to come up with something better. (And no, promoting it as being pronounced "NewLinux" is not the solution. Explain to the marketdroid that that's not far enough "outside the box"...)
I'm not aware of any MSDOS-based applications that can't be run on the NT/2K/XP platform, with the possible exception of some games and things that do funky direct hardware access, which is hardly likely to be a requirement at the Department of the Interior.
There's no way a new policy which involves standardizing on Win95 can be rationally defended for a large organization today.
The amazing thing to me is that Windows 95 can be such a source of maintenance issues and capability limitations, so it seems like shooting yourself in the foot (or a masochistic job security mechanism?)
I know of companies that still downgrade new workstations to NT4, for example, but at least that's a "real" operating system. (For light-duty workstation use, anyway;)
A GUI doesn't make a person understand less in a "cause and effect" sort of way, it's a correlation
I've made a bit of a case for cause and effect in this message.
The entire problem with GUIs is that they almost always go too far. They figure if they can hide one thing from you to make things "easier" then they might as well hide EVERYTHING from you.
I think that's one issue, but there are others. Again, the message linked above covers some.
I think that also comes down to the individual in some ways.
Oh, absolutely - in many ways. But the GUI as only interface creates a barrier even for the curious.
You speak of Winzip yes? =P
Yes. A fairly poor GUI, IMO - but it has colorful buttons, whoopee!
Yet it really annoys me when people badmouth Apache because they need to edit a config file. I mean it's all documented RIGHT THERE. No need to look most things up, it's right beside the option. You really can't get any better help than that.
Exactly! Plus, you can add your own comments. Part of the problem is that GUIs and GUI development is not sophisticated enough to completely replace the richness and flexibility of good old text.
Of course I'm sort of a hipocrite in many ways. I refuse to install a GUI on our Linux servers, but I will only use menuconfig when doing stuff with the kernel.
That's fine, but the point is that you have an option. That's what's really important.
The real problem here is that designers & developers are too willing to throw out something very practical and flexible in favor of what they perceive as a whiz-bang solution, when they haven't fully understood the benefits - many of them quite subtle - that the original system provided.
Sure, not all conf files are exemplary, but then many GUI configs are atrocious. Some confs that I like include squid and samba, and some of the firewall confs (and scripts, for that matter) that I've worked with. Often, smaller conf files don't need much documentation, and they're still fine to work with. I was tweaking my setup of 'motion' today (video motion detection), and it has a short comment above each setting which works just fine.
However, there's more to the conf file issue than whether or not the original author writes a good one. A conf file can be a repository for documentation about changes that have been made at a particular site. Try adding a notation in a typical GUI config to explain why you've set a value a particular way..conf files can be version controlled and diffed. Try that with the Windows registry, or with Active Directory.
.conf files can be edited and processed by multiple standard tools, which allows users to use their own favorite tools of choice, and makes remote access trivial. They can be navigated through and filtered in ways chosen by the user. Again, with gui configs, these things range from non-trivial and klunky, to practically impossible.
Linus wrote a bit of a defense of text some years back, which made other points also, but I'd have to try and dig that up.
I don't think the CLI "makes you smarter", but it doesn't encourage you to be dumb. You're right about lazy developers - I'm one of them, and I typically start out writing apps with only the most obvious error handling, then retrofit where necessary. Welcome to the real world. However, developing good GUI configurations is more difficult than developing a good text config, so text wins the lazy developer argument also.
Still, I'm not saying that GUIs shouldn't exist. However, the Unix approach of having GUIs as a layer over a text config is far more flexible and featureful than the Windows approach. GUIs become a problem when they're the only truly human-usable interface to a system. If your conceptual model of the OS comes only from the GUI (since the registry and AD aren't much help in that respect), you don't get the benefit of multiple views of the system to allow you to develop an interface-independent model of what the underlying system itself is doing. In that sense, for people who don't go out of their way to look beyond the one and only interface that's made available to them, GUIs encourage dumbness.
When I am talking all Microsoft environment, I mean Windows 95, because that is what he is running on a P3 machine down there, and it came with windows 2000 on it.
Are you trolling? You can't be serious, and more importantly, you can't possibly be correct. I can't imagine a department-wide policy, in 2002, being formulated that involves standardizing on Windows 9x/Me over Win2K or XP. Windows 9x/Me is based on MS-DOS, for crying out loud! The admin problems are legendary! Oh, the humanity! Oh, the tax dollars!!
Ha! Think you can out-nitpick me?! We'll see about that!;o)
I'm not saying GUI's are never useful - I work in one GUI or other a lot of the time. If they're well designed, they're especially useful for doing something that you're not very familiar with, which is why they're so important to end users.
But we were talking about sysadmins, and the problem there is that a sysadmin's primary understanding of a system should not derive from the GUI, but that's what tends to happen with Windows.
As you suggested, on Windows you're often dead in the water without direct editing of the registry. The problem is, I know admins who are scared to touch the registry, unless they're following exact instructions signed by an agent of Bill. A human factor design flaw here is that the registry has no integrated documentation.
A good.conf file, OTOH, typically has explanatory text, examples, and defaults, which make them much more useful and educational than those Captain Obvious help files you mentioned.
I agree that wizards are even worse than GUIs. My favorite pastime, not, is sending detailed, brain-dead level emails to someone about how to unzip a particular file, which they proceed to completely ignore and instead use the wizard, which unzips everything to a godforsaken folder in the depths of the Program Files directory, that the user can't ever seem to locate again.
So I'd say it's a spectrum - from the.conf file's "linguistic" interface, to the GUI, which is a kind of passive wizard, to fully active wizards. The next step is what Sun just announced - fully automated machines, so that the kind of admins I'm talking about don't have to understand anything except how to respond to the pink slip that they so richly deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
The point being? Modern jet fighters are catapult-launched off aircraft carriers.
The Wright Brothers were three years earlier, and were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight. That makes it hard to sustain the claim that Dumont was "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane" (as claimed in the post I responded to).
They were working in secrecy
For their first successful flight on Dec 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers invited everyone living within five or six miles. Not many attended because of skepticism, and the winter weather.
They asked their father, in this telegram, to inform the press, although it was over a year before the information appeared anywhere. For interest's sake, here's the text of the telegram:
I'm sure if they could have posted on Slashdot at the time, they would have.Santos-Dumont made a point of inventing for the benefit of humankind
Good for him. So you're saying that Dumont has some kind of moral advantage, but that doesn't change who achieved it first.
You ain't never gonna see 'em coming!
Factual corrections are appreciated...
Well, if you're building it on your own, without anyone else knowing about it, then it's not a standard, is it? Unless you're talking about internal company standards, in which case you can do what you like, just don't expect the rest of the world to accept it. The point is that to increase the chance for your product to be widely accepted, it helps to conform to agreed-on standards. What's so complicated or confusing about that?
The underlying issue that I think you're missing is that you only need standards when the product you're creating is just one of many similar alternatives. If you had a truly innovative product, you wouldn't need any standards, you'd just create your own. Take Dean Kamen's Segway, for example. He didn't have to come up with an open standard for a gyroscopically stabilized two-wheeled human transporter - he just invented it and patented it (although he still runs afoul of road use standards, but that's a different issue).
So, if you want to be creating your own standards, you have to actually invent something, not just manufacture the same recycled pap that the company down the road is creating.
The problem, and where the SEI attitude falls down, is that it's very difficult to draw a bright line at the point where innovation is no longer needed. The truth is that in a sense, innovation is needed everywhere, in different measures and different kinds. So you're correct that the attempt to impose uniformity on everything can have a horribly stifling effect, and we see this in large corporations all the time. The biggest difference between small and large companies, and the reason why large companies still buy up small ones, is because the small ones have the freedom be original - the large ones, mostly, don't.
I think we could do a much better job in these areas, but's it going to take some innovators to reform the system. This is hardly original, but the biggest problem is that the people who understand the value of these things are not the pencil-pushers who run things, and all the pencil-pushers ever want to know is where their next quarter's revenue is coming from.
However, I don't think innovation has slowed to a crawl at all - there's a lot of interesting stuff happening, all over the place. One problem is that at the consumer level, a sort of plateau has been reached, where much of what a consumer would want is already available, and it's just refinement from here on. I mean, cellphones with built-in PDAs, PDAs with built-in cellphones, HDTV, media convergence, woop-de-do. Most of it isn't very life-changing. We're stuck in a local minimum, or something, and it'll take a big invention to get out. (I want my flying car! :)
It seems that the vast mindless majority is too threatened by the idea that someone can still do it all. And its become non-politically correct to hurt their self-esteem by telling them any different.
On the plus side, if you actually achieve something, many of those mindless majority will adore you with almost the same fervour usually reserved for Britney Spears. Hmm, a little scary, that. Perhaps that's why there are problems with innovation...
C'mon, you CPU hardware guys haven't come up with anything new in, like, decades. One guy came up with the transistor - props to him. Some other guy came up with the CPU - good work, that man. Then after that, all you little clone drones carried on just making the same thing over and over, getting smaller and faster on each iteration. Kinda like the Swiss watchmakers. Ooh! It's a millimeter thick, and it still tells time exactly the way the one we made 200 years ago did! Woohoo!
The least you could do is come up with a decent silicon-level execution model (Von Neumann is so twentieth-century) so us parasitic trend-followers don't have to waste our time dealing with a teensy array of "registers" and the like. I dunno, native chip-level lambda calculus support might be nice, for a change.
Anyhoo, wake me up when you guys actually come up with another invention, willya?
I realize I'm preaching to one of the choirleaders, but as someone who switched away (a number of years ago) from being very involved with development on MS platforms, my perspective is that although MS does provide a lot of useful and well-organized material on MSDN, what they don't provide is not only telling, but can be crippling for a developer.
Microsoft goes out of its way to "strategically" hide and obfuscate things that it considers to provide a competitive edge, or things that it thinks may reflect badly on the company. It repeatedly and consistently takes action based on its own most narrow interpretation of its self-interest (forget about enlightened self-interest - a foreign concept to Microsoft).
I think what Microsoft has missed in the larger sense of assessing its own actions and policies, is that a software company like Microsoft is not like companies that sell other kinds of products. It relies on developers who commit large portions of their time to working intimately with their products. In a sense, every developer who uses Microsoft products should be considered an MVP, in the sense that they should be given access to information that helps them do their jobs without needless frustration and deliberate stonewalling and delaying tactics.
Microsoft is not the only closed-source software company that has problems in this area, but it's certainly the most prominent. In that position, it's in their own interests to try to do a better job. Microsoft showed no inclinations in this direction until open source began threatening its business model. What Ballmer is saying reflects the first time in a long time that Microsoft has actually said something that essentially translates to "we have to do a better job of providing real value to our customers".
Microsoft and its customers owe a tremendous debt to open source for that kick in the pants. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft is actually capable of delivering the value it's talking about.
Hilarious!
I started to read it, but next thing I knew I was face down on the keyboard, snoring. I plan to try again when I'm safely in bed tonight...
Crichton's a smart guy, but he's not that far ahead of his time. Back in the 60's, they used active seismometers on the moon, which detonated charges to create shockwaves in order to measure the depth of the regolith (outer layer of loose rock & dust). The 3D imaging bit is newer, but people have also done things like use the vibrations from earthquakes to measure the size and rough shape of underground cavities.
Make that GNU/screwed...
Oh geez, I'm screwed.
Bruce did not provide a reason, let alone a halfway decent one. He made two unconnected statements. There's no connection between calling it "GNU/Linux" and the fact that people are trying various things to encumber Linux's freedom. No connection whatsoever, except in Richard Stallman's mind, and in the minds of those who wish to curry favor with him or remain in his good books.
Stallman should apply his legendary mind to his own actions, and possibly see a therapist about this obsession of his if he is not capable of overcoming it on his own. That would truly be good for the community.
I'm a little disturbed that my brain was able to follow the same patterns as Stallman's in this respect... Maybe I heard it somewhere and remembered it subconsciously, yeah, that's the ticket!
The solution to what, for crying out loud???
The problem with GNU/Linux is that "all of the folks out there" tend to be sensitive to little things like catchy names, brand identity, etc. "GNU/Linux" is the answer to the question "how can we confuse and annoy the user base?"
The FSF would have as much chance of succeeding if it asked the community to start calling it LiGNUx. (Hope I'm not giving anyone any ideas.)
I suggest that the real solution is for the FSF to do what many other organizations with unpalatable names have done, and change "GNU" to something less klunky. In this particular case, even an off-the-shelf marketdroid who boasts of being able to "think outside the box" might actually be able to come up with something better. (And no, promoting it as being pronounced "NewLinux" is not the solution. Explain to the marketdroid that that's not far enough "outside the box"...)
There's no way a new policy which involves standardizing on Win95 can be rationally defended for a large organization today.
I know of companies that still downgrade new workstations to NT4, for example, but at least that's a "real" operating system. (For light-duty workstation use, anyway ;)
No, but imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
I've made a bit of a case for cause and effect in this message.
The entire problem with GUIs is that they almost always go too far. They figure if they can hide one thing from you to make things "easier" then they might as well hide EVERYTHING from you.
I think that's one issue, but there are others. Again, the message linked above covers some.
I think that also comes down to the individual in some ways.
Oh, absolutely - in many ways. But the GUI as only interface creates a barrier even for the curious.
You speak of Winzip yes? =P
Yes. A fairly poor GUI, IMO - but it has colorful buttons, whoopee!
Yet it really annoys me when people badmouth Apache because they need to edit a config file. I mean it's all documented RIGHT THERE. No need to look most things up, it's right beside the option. You really can't get any better help than that.
Exactly! Plus, you can add your own comments. Part of the problem is that GUIs and GUI development is not sophisticated enough to completely replace the richness and flexibility of good old text.
Of course I'm sort of a hipocrite in many ways. I refuse to install a GUI on our Linux servers, but I will only use menuconfig when doing stuff with the kernel.
That's fine, but the point is that you have an option. That's what's really important.
The real problem here is that designers & developers are too willing to throw out something very practical and flexible in favor of what they perceive as a whiz-bang solution, when they haven't fully understood the benefits - many of them quite subtle - that the original system provided.
However, there's more to the conf file issue than whether or not the original author writes a good one. A conf file can be a repository for documentation about changes that have been made at a particular site. Try adding a notation in a typical GUI config to explain why you've set a value a particular way. .conf files can be version controlled and diffed. Try that with the Windows registry, or with Active Directory.
Linus wrote a bit of a defense of text some years back, which made other points also, but I'd have to try and dig that up.
I don't think the CLI "makes you smarter", but it doesn't encourage you to be dumb. You're right about lazy developers - I'm one of them, and I typically start out writing apps with only the most obvious error handling, then retrofit where necessary. Welcome to the real world. However, developing good GUI configurations is more difficult than developing a good text config, so text wins the lazy developer argument also.
Still, I'm not saying that GUIs shouldn't exist. However, the Unix approach of having GUIs as a layer over a text config is far more flexible and featureful than the Windows approach. GUIs become a problem when they're the only truly human-usable interface to a system. If your conceptual model of the OS comes only from the GUI (since the registry and AD aren't much help in that respect), you don't get the benefit of multiple views of the system to allow you to develop an interface-independent model of what the underlying system itself is doing. In that sense, for people who don't go out of their way to look beyond the one and only interface that's made available to them, GUIs encourage dumbness.
Sorry I doubted you. Someone needs to make sure the interior department doesn't completely mess this up!
Are you trolling? You can't be serious, and more importantly, you can't possibly be correct. I can't imagine a department-wide policy, in 2002, being formulated that involves standardizing on Windows 9x/Me over Win2K or XP. Windows 9x/Me is based on MS-DOS, for crying out loud! The admin problems are legendary! Oh, the humanity! Oh, the tax dollars!!
Ha! Think you can out-nitpick me?! We'll see about that! ;o)
I'm not saying GUI's are never useful - I work in one GUI or other a lot of the time. If they're well designed, they're especially useful for doing something that you're not very familiar with, which is why they're so important to end users.
But we were talking about sysadmins, and the problem there is that a sysadmin's primary understanding of a system should not derive from the GUI, but that's what tends to happen with Windows.
As you suggested, on Windows you're often dead in the water without direct editing of the registry. The problem is, I know admins who are scared to touch the registry, unless they're following exact instructions signed by an agent of Bill. A human factor design flaw here is that the registry has no integrated documentation.
A good .conf file, OTOH, typically has explanatory text, examples, and defaults, which make them much more useful and educational than those Captain Obvious help files you mentioned.
I agree that wizards are even worse than GUIs. My favorite pastime, not, is sending detailed, brain-dead level emails to someone about how to unzip a particular file, which they proceed to completely ignore and instead use the wizard, which unzips everything to a godforsaken folder in the depths of the Program Files directory, that the user can't ever seem to locate again.
So I'd say it's a spectrum - from the .conf file's "linguistic" interface, to the GUI, which is a kind of passive wizard, to fully active wizards. The next step is what Sun just announced - fully automated machines, so that the kind of admins I'm talking about don't have to understand anything except how to respond to the pink slip that they so richly deserve.
Ah, I feel better now... :)
Thanks for putting the final nail in the coffin of that joke... May it join beowulf and all your base, and rest in peace.
Nah, you just need the right diet... Your dinner tonight.