Perhaps you are not correctly understanding the article and it's intent. Here is the abstract of the article from the front page of JEP (Journal of Electronic Publishing).
Bradley Dilger writes that making computers "easy" may also make them less useful. "Ease is never free: its gain is matched
by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof," he says. He urges professors to understand the
inimical effects of ease and explore pedagogical practices that can counter those effects.
Dilger's article is firstly aimed at academics who normally read the JEP, not the typical Slashdot crowd. He at no point claims that GUIs are completely bad, or that ease of use is bad (or even undesirable), but only that the ideology of ease is something that should be examined closely, as it has a great deal of potentially negative side-effects.
If you look at the very bottom of an article (before the footnotes and bibliography), you'll notice that Dilger writes:
This paper is one of the first things I've written about the ideology of ease. I hope I'll be able to grow the material here (and lots
that isn't here) into a dissertation in the next few years.
What he's saying essentially is that he is opening a formal enquiry into this particular subject. It's the beginning of a scholarly dialogue about the ideology of ease; understanding this can be greatly beneficial to both academics and programmers and developers.
The word "gamut" has its origins in Medieval music theory... In the Ancient Greek system, the lowest possible pitch is represented by the symbol gamma. Medieval theorists, when devising solfege ("do, a deer," etc.) used the term "ut" instead of do. "gamma ut" was the lowest possible version of "ut" in the current hexachord system, created by placing "ut" at the bottom of the possible range. (it's a really convoluted system) "gamma ut" was eventually contracted to gamut, and used to represent the entirety of the music range, and then went from there. Tinctoris
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the very bottom of an article (before the footnotes and bibliography), you'll notice that Dilger writes:
What he's saying essentially is that he is opening a formal enquiry into this particular subject. It's the beginning of a scholarly dialogue about the ideology of ease; understanding this can be greatly beneficial to both academics and programmers and developers.The word "gamut" has its origins in Medieval music theory... In the Ancient Greek system, the lowest possible pitch is represented by the symbol gamma. Medieval theorists, when devising solfege ("do, a deer," etc.) used the term "ut" instead of do. "gamma ut" was the lowest possible version of "ut" in the current hexachord system, created by placing "ut" at the bottom of the possible range. (it's a really convoluted system) "gamma ut" was eventually contracted to gamut, and used to represent the entirety of the music range, and then went from there. Tinctoris