First of all, many people will try out a program and if they cannot make sense of it in the first few minutes, they'll chuck it.
You don't know how much I truly wish that that were so.:-( Look at the people expecting to learn how to use C++, Perl, or Java just by "guessing" or clicking. Scary as all get-out.
Programming languages, operating systems, shells, editors, debuggers, window managers, mailreaders, newsreaders, webreaders, etc are heavy-use items that should be designed in such a way as to allow their users to develop *skill* at their use. Sometimes I think "skill" is a word the PC word-police will come and take me away for during the night.
You can't get rogue motions in lynx. That's because it does have X/Y commands you can map to. It doesn't really care about the screen, but it pretends it does. That's the bug.
You can't get rogue motions in lynx. That's because it does have X/Y commands you can map to. It doesn't really care about the screen, but it pretends it does. That's the bug.
Certainly an rn-style or rogue-style web browser would be a lot easier for Unix users. It really feels more like a CP/M program than a Unix program to me. At least SIGINT wouldn't murder your entire context no questions asked. Somebody doesn't know that SIGINT should interrupt a program, not murder it. Imagine if netscape or emacs or vi just completely dies if you hit your intr char. Eek!
It really doesn't seem that you would have to do too much to lynx to make it usable, but I suspect that this is an illusion. You'd probably have to do a lot of low-level changes to allow screen navigation to make any amount of sense.
Another terrible lynx bug is the search. It doesn't handle regex matches, which is a cardinal sin. And it doesn't have a "find next" keystroke, like "n" in less. And if you give a null search string, it doesn't understand to repeat the previous one. You have to type it in again and again. Very un-Unixy. Plus it often seems to do the wrong thing.
I'm surprised that vim (the new emacs:-) doesn't yet have a web-browsing mode. That would solve a lot of these design errors all at once.
It's been reported that the foot-mouse idea doesn't really work. Perhaps it just takes more getting used to. Maybe one should take organ lessons first, or something.:-)
But even for simple clicking, there are problems. Apparently the neural pathways between toe and brain take longer to traverse than to the hand and back. There could be a simple issue of time-delay effects here. Another matter is the granularity of control. Your brain has a whole lot of grey matter devoted to hand use, and much much less for the foot. You just aren't going to be as nimble.
With mouseless movement via keyboard mouse emulation you don't have fine-grained pointer control. It's extremely awkward to move around. It's like using arrow keys instead of a mouse to play a fast-action game like xbill.
A more fundamental flaw that cannot be fixed through physical reconfiguration is that non-drawing programs that make overly heavy mouse use usually misdesiged. Sure, if you have a bitmap, you want a high precision pointer device. But for most other things, you don't. Nonetheless, somebody got this insanely fucked up idea that if it's got a mouse interface, it's easy to use for a novice. This just isn't true at all. And even if it were so, optimizing for a novice instead of a long-time user is nutty. You're only a novice once, and then for a very short time. You have to spend the rest of your life as a non-novice suffering with the design decisions made for people who don't know what they're doing. It doesn't have to be this way, because you could design a program to help both sorts. But nobody does. They forget that the experienced user is more important than the novice, because his annoyance will be compounded across the time interval. If you have to design for only one, choose the real user, not the novice. If you can design for both, better yet.
The proper solution is for a program to be designed to allow the user to describe what he wants to do using a richer command set. There's a reason it's called a "point-and-drool" interface: it's been expert-proofed. Witness Motif text widgets.
You can't retrofit a keyboard-simulated mouse on an overly mousey program and ever manage Extreme Keyboarding. This takes careful design in the program so that you hit the right abstraction levels, not mere pointer emulation. We don't see much of that these days.
However, a common lament is that netscape doesn't allow you to tab. This is very true and very annoying. But for those who don't keep track of Mozilla's development, Mozilla does allow you to tab through the links, making keyboard naviagation much easier.
One of supreme annoyances with lynx is the way Cartesian movement commands do NOT get reflected on your screen. For example, if you have a two links (A and B) on one line, and one more (C) on the next, and you're sitting on the leftmost link, A, consider what happens when you say "move down". You don't move down. You move right. And the "move left" key doesn't move you left. It's a back button. And you can't fix this by rebinding keys, such as to use the regular rogue motions instead of painful arrows.
This is a fundamental flaw, because the designers destroyed the connection between screen motion and motion commands. They should have a follow link and a pop link stack command which are separate from the Cartesian motions. Left should move you in a negative direction along the X axis. Right should move you in a positive direction along the X axis. Up should move you in a negative direction along the Y axis. Down should move you in a positive direction along the Y axis. Anything else is madness because it's completely counterintuitive given the normal notion up up/down/left/right.
would have to disagree. At least in the 0.15 releases and later, you can bind EVERYTHING to keys. I have a majority of my window management setup on the keyboard.
How do you in E access what twm does with its warpto and warpring functionality?
fvwm2 is quite good to use without a mouse. The reason: you can make it switch to a specific window with on key stroke based on the WM_TITLE and WM_CLASS of that window
You can do that with twm and tvtwm, too.
"F9" = : all : f.warpto "Console" "F10" = : all : f.warpto "Netscape"
You can also have different icon managers for different classes of program. You'd be surprised at how much you can do. You should read through the tvtwm manpage sometime, carefully.
Sometimes you give up hope that the legal process will ever pull through, or that it will do so in time. There are plenty of cases where our courts are just too slow to keep up. But given the choice of letting them rush things and make a mistake, or having them dawdle and let the horses out the gate, I guess slowness is the better option, frustrating though it might otherwise appear. Do the least harm, and all. (Assuming that slow does less harm than fast.)
Still, it makes some situations unassailable by the legal process. I'm thinking of cases with gigabucks to tie up courts while technological changes render the matter moot.
You're right. Sending mail shouldn't be complicated. And it never used to be. You'd type mail user@host.dom to send it, and you'd type mail to read it. Nothing could be easier. Now it's infinitely harder.
Of course, setting up a proper SMTP gateway is something else, but that's why there's such a thing as a professional systems adminstrator.
I'm right with you on this special-purpose computer thing. It doesn't matter whether it's a VCR, a security system, my car, a calculator, or any of these exciting new gadgets coming out. But general purpose computers are different things. I wish I could find that quote from Scott McSolaris about Wintel boxes being the only computer you own that... what was it? Crashes all the time? Is too hard for you to use? Something like that.
So lets [sic] get this straight, someone doesn't feel the need to learn computers, or is put off by them, is by default lazy?
Nope.
Someone who wants to use something, including and especially a computer, without learning how to use it, is lazy, stupid, or both. Either way, he's an unhappy victim of ludicrously false expectations.
Learning is fundamental. If you don't want to learn how to fly an airplane, or can't be bothered to take the time, then get out of the fricking cockpit. Now. You're a danger to yourself and others.
You've completely missed the point: you say computers are easy so long as you have time and a desire to learn, or, to read between your lines, if you have a knack for problem-solving. Of course I don't intend to disagree with you. You're completely correct. And you merely support my point, for which I thank you.
My point is that the general public is filled with people who do not wish to learn. They do not have the urge to learn that you point out is needed. They do not want to be forced to take the time for it, which you point out is necessary.
Problem solving that is a pleasurable pastime for programmers and administrators is pure hell for other people. Learning may be fun for us, but it is not fun for them. This is the whole problem. They want to do things that require learning, but they want to do them without satifying those inescapable pre-requisites. They're in over their heads, because they've been sold a big lie.
Our lazy, petulant, anti-intellectual, and completely pathetic public masses demand both tasteless and microwavable TV dinners as well as the software that corresponds to them.
Somehow who hates reading, hates learning, hates puzzles, hates problem solving, and hates logic should not expect to touch a computer without a professional holding their tremulous hand. A computer is not an appliance for dummies, and if you won't pay your dues to actually invest the real time it takes to honestly learn something, you will suffer. Better to hire yourself a secretary and let him deal with it for you.
You might both be right, depending on what you're each thinking.
Any POSIX conformant system will have essentially the same API. By that way of thinking, OpenMVS, OpenVMS, Solaris, AIX, Irix, Tru64 Unix, BSD, Linux, and yes, even the crippled NT subsystem seems quite similar. If the Hurd attempts to conform to the POSIX spec, then it would seem very similar to Linux or Solaris or BSD, which also make the same attempt. write(2) and read(2) et alia are pretty much the same everywhere. MS-DOS, on the other hand, seems quite different, because it is not standards conforming.
Of course, to someone hacking on the kernel source code, you, Daniel, are completely correct. A regular Unix kernel hacker will look for a long time for bdevsw in something running on top of a microkernel and never find it.
Superficially you'd think there's an element of jealousy there because Stallman almost wrote an OS then someone else got most of the limelight by writing the kernel... but that just doesn't feel like the case
I realize that emacs is a fine operating system, but some of us still prefer Unix.
Einstein had a bigger brain by a little bit, but the left and right hemispheres of his cortex (IIRC) was connected, where in normal people it generally isn't. It isn't how many connections you have, it is how they are connected, and how they are used.
Apparently violin-playing helps. Here's an excerpt from a longer article:
There is also some recent evidence that the increased information processing requirements of expertise lead to skill expansion over large areas of the cortex. Expertise in violin playing depends upon fine coordination of the left hand fingers and accurate coordination between the two hands. If expertise is related to increased cortical area devoted to finger coordination, we would expect expert violinists to devote more of their brain to finger coordination. This is indeed the case. Expert violinists have two to three times as much area cortical area devoted to their left fingers as nonviolinists (Elbert, Pantev, Wienbruch, Rochstroh & Taub, 1995). Moreover, the need of expert violinists to coordinate their two hands leads them to develop a larger connection between the two sides of the brain dealing with motor coordination compared to nonviolinists (Schlaug, Jaencke, Huang, Staiger & Steinmetz, 1995). Thus, there is not only theoretical but empirical evidence that expertise needs large amounts of brain to store and actively process its informational chunks. This suggests that a strong connection should exist between the capacity for acquiring expertise skills and brain mass.
I'm sure it's no coincidence that Einstein himself played violin. Then again, so does a good friend of mine whose name I'd probably best not mention.:-)
The pursuit for easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces is creating a generation of lazy computer users, and worse, a generation of lazy computer programmers that won't survive outside an IDE w ith context-sensitive help and syntax highlighting. And bad programmers create bad programs.
While I agree with your principal thrust, I do take small exception to your use of the word "intuitive". People just say intuitive when what they really mean familiar. The only intuitive interface is, as we all know, the nipple.:-) For a vi user, rogue is intuitive. To my grandmother, no program is intuitive, although the keyboard is enough like her typewriter to strike a resonance there.
The laziness you mention is just one manifestation of our "gimme-gimme, now-now" culture. Nobody wants to bother to read the manual. Nobody wants to actually have to learn anything. Delayed gratification is as welcome in the general populace as it is in your average two-year-old.
Computer use has been reduced to an unskilled labor position. That sounds funny, doesn't it? But of course, many of you doubtless say, using a computer is unskilled labor position. Surely I'm not suggesting that it ever was, or that it should be?
Why, yes; that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Think about it. It wasn't all that long ago that you'd have been regarded as either a starry-eyed lunatic or a hopeless simpleton if you had suggested that computer programming, computer administration, or computer use should be counted as unskilled labor, requiring no prior skills or special training. Today, the reverse of this occurs. To suggest that there's anything to it is to foster "elitism", a verbal icon for the tired old idea that hard work and genuine skill can ever produce more competence than can sloth and slackery. Sorry, but it's true.
What's pushing this insanity is the market economy (and the media culture). The pressure to demonstrate stellar revenue growth on each and every corporate quarterly report drives those who pander software to do completely stupid things. They have to sell their goods to people who are completely and utterly unskilled. Why? Because there are more of them, and they've got money, that's why.
Vendors cannot require even average intelligence for the learning and use of their software, lest half their market be cut off from them. Consequently, they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use, thereby restricting all of us to a childish level of interaction with our computers. It's embarrassing. Welcome to America.
It's like trying to read only comic strips and calling this literature. It's insulting. Yes, it takes time, work, and dedication to learn to read well enough to handle the Great Books rather than mere comic strips. But it's also worth it. Reduced to a level a discourse that even a quasi-illiterate child could fathom, our entire society suffers, leaving us all impoverished.
This zero-learning-curve principle for software is hardly the only force driving software manufacturers to previously unimaginable levels of idiocy, but it's a critically important, and the one which explains your own observation. Other factors include the notion that customer is always right, that more features are better, that software can in later releases have post-design features haphazardly accreted onto it like a child's fort at a junkyard, that flexible tools are only for professionals, that it's better to get a bad product out now than a good product out later, and that lack of backwards compatibility drives sales.
Our society is, as you indirectly observe, full of lazy people. They don't want to work for anything. They just want it handed to them on a silver platter, already raised and slaughtered and packaged and cooked and salted and cut up into bite-sized pieces to feed to their kiddies--and themselves.
Well, I've got sad news. Computers require skills. They do not produce jobs for unskilled laborers. But with books on the market with titles remarkably close to "Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in Five Days", or "How to Be a Concert Pianist in Ten Hours of Easy Listening", or "Wiring Your Backplane for Dummies", or "Become an Air-Traffic Controller Overnight", you see what's going on.
Computers aren't for the unskilled. It's not a television. It's not a garage door opener. Sure, you can get those things, but that's just the tip of the iceberg--the iceberg that's going to sink your boat. You can't be a systems adminstrator without prior skills. You certainly can't be a programmer without developing some serious skills. You can't even adminstrate a computer without developing serious skills.
Yet nary a day passes me by that someone whose idea of computers is limited to Word Perfect or Microsoft Word comes to me and effectively asks, "How can I use Perl to program my CGI script to handle a multistage shopping cart with distributed database connectivity, animated vector graphics, secure transactions, robustness in the face of complete systems failure, and online credit card verification -- and which scales to a thousand hits per second?" They have absolutely no programming background whatsoever. I gently (or sometimes, ungently) explain that you can't possibly teach them enough in a day, or three, for them to be able to do this, and no, there is no online tutorial either.
"But surely, computers are easy!" they retort. "The Web is therefore easy. Programming must be easy, too." This whole exchange really pisses them off. They've heard all this from millions of adverts, that anybody can do any of this, and that anybody can get rich quick without years of study. They've heard it so often that they're sure that those few of us who tell them otherwise must necessarily be lying to them. They saw it on TV, so it must be true, and we "professionals" (sorry, that's the old word; the new word is "elistist"; same thing) have to feeding them a line of bull to protect our own income streams.
When someone can't even manage to use Legos, they'll never be able to construct a skyscraper in a day or three of study. You just can't get there from here. Why do they think they should be able to? Because of the Big Lie that anyone can do anything they want with computers without learning squat. Without working. Instantly.
There's a reason people go to school for years to learn this kind of thing, and have professional internships to develop job skills. You can't just expect an illiterate street person to do this job. But people do. They really do. They think managing a computer (being a sysadmin) must be as easy as putting gas in their car, and that programming one must be as easy as adding oil to that car. Well, it isn't. This isn't unskilled labor. It never will be. Time to burst their bubble. This is the kinder thing to do than giving them false expectations of something for nothing.
It will, not, of course, happen. Corporate greed and sound-byte media coverage will see to it that the lies are left intact. But nobody will ever be happy, because lies remain lies.
And, when all is said and done, it's IE. If it were a perfect port, it would look and act like the Windows version. And a lot of people on slashdot would apparently like that very much. Your "winix" argument is completely based on personal taste. I agree with you about that a lot of the time, but realize that most people don't, even a lot of people on slashdot.
Now I am completely mystified. I'm quite serious. If all they want is Microsoft crap, what's the issue? Is it that they want free Microsoft crap? Or is it that they want Microsoft crap that they can hack? Or both? Or something else? In any event, they're still buggered by the shaft of the Microsoft's moronic mentality.
I certainly hope you're wrong. I really do. And if you're not, then I wish they'd go back to Bill.
What's the problem? Well, suppose Microsoft wants to sell as much as they can. (Good bet, that.) This means they need to make their software accessible to everyone they can. That means they probably need to go at least one standard deviation below the mean. Once they get something that someone with an IQ of 85 is going to be able to be happy with, do you really think they'll bother making something for those of us who are a few stdevs out on the other end? Of course not.
personally, i've aLwayS tHougHt that the worsT nAmes werE those that had inTercaPs In them, if yoU Know whaT i mean. wOrdS tHat sHould reallY Be HYphEnated Or separAted, But which gEt raMmed toGetheR. it's completelY stuPid.
Great title. It's often quoted, sometimes a bit mangled. But it's just as true now as then, which just goes to show you that Man remains Man, regardless of how "civilized" he becomes.
The original wording was
"Pone seram, cohibe." Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor.
"Bolt her in, keep her indoors." But who is to guard the guards themselves? Your wife arranges accordingly and begins with them.
It's from line 347 of the sixth Satire from Juvenal (circa 60-130 anno domini). For the curious, here's an English translation of the whole thing--since for some peculiar reason, Babelfish is completely ignorant of Latin.:-(
Then again, Juvenal was discussing women here, not spooks, and one presumes (or hopes) that these are slightly different concerns.:-)
That's interesting. I'm running version 4.04, or so it claims, and it "never" crashes on me. Then again, I disable both those silly J-things. Perhaps that's why.
in this country, we are raised to fear and distrust the government.
(I presume you mean in the United States of America.)
Well, certainly many of us are, and by and large, I'd say your statement is considerably more true here in America than it is in many other countries. Isn't one of the fabled three great lies I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.?
My perception is that countries with more paperwork, regulations, and government overhead actually get that way because people like having a government to take care of them and watch over them. Compare the American sentiment toward government with how people feel in France and Germany, for example. Where many Americans tend to place government in the problem set, I get the feeling that many Europeans place government in the solution set.
Does America fear government because of 1776? Is part of it because we were often colonized by refugees, even back to the Pilgrims? Does France similarly dislike nobility because of their own revolution? If so, why do they enjoy so much government intervention?
What about Australia? They, too, were colonized by many of society's underdesirables. Do they have a similar attitude toward their government? Does their not having a revolution influence their viewpoint?
IE 4.0 or 5.0 for UNIX: gold. Oh god, it's worse than alpha!
First of all, what is this nonsense of equating "Unix" and "Solaris"? If it's for Unix, it should work on any Unix (or at least, POSIX-compliant) system.
Secondly, is it really very surprising that they can't make it work very well on even one particular Unix system, let alone the overwhelming majority.
Finally, even if they did make it work, it would surely be nothing but yet another annoying Winix program, ranging between awkward and anathema to Unix programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Programming languages, operating systems, shells, editors, debuggers, window managers, mailreaders, newsreaders, webreaders, etc are heavy-use items that should be designed in such a way as to allow their users to develop *skill* at their use. Sometimes I think "skill" is a word the PC word-police will come and take me away for during the night.
Certainly an rn-style or rogue-style web browser would be a lot easier for Unix users. It really feels more like a CP/M program than a Unix program to me. At least SIGINT wouldn't murder your entire context no questions asked. Somebody doesn't know that SIGINT should interrupt a program, not murder it. Imagine if netscape or emacs or vi just completely dies if you hit your intr char. Eek!
It really doesn't seem that you would have to do too much to lynx to make it usable, but I suspect that this is an illusion. You'd probably have to do a lot of low-level changes to allow screen navigation to make any amount of sense.
Another terrible lynx bug is the search. It doesn't handle regex matches, which is a cardinal sin. And it doesn't have a "find next" keystroke, like "n" in less. And if you give a null search string, it doesn't understand to repeat the previous one. You have to type it in again and again. Very un-Unixy. Plus it often seems to do the wrong thing.
I'm surprised that vim (the new emacs :-) doesn't yet have a web-browsing mode. That would solve a lot of these design errors all at once.
But even for simple clicking, there are problems. Apparently the neural pathways between toe and brain take longer to traverse than to the hand and back. There could be a simple issue of time-delay effects here. Another matter is the granularity of control. Your brain has a whole lot of grey matter devoted to hand use, and much much less for the foot. You just aren't going to be as nimble.
With mouseless movement via keyboard mouse emulation you don't have fine-grained pointer control. It's extremely awkward to move around. It's like using arrow keys instead of a mouse to play a fast-action game like xbill.
A more fundamental flaw that cannot be fixed through physical reconfiguration is that non-drawing programs that make overly heavy mouse use usually misdesiged. Sure, if you have a bitmap, you want a high precision pointer device. But for most other things, you don't. Nonetheless, somebody got this insanely fucked up idea that if it's got a mouse interface, it's easy to use for a novice. This just isn't true at all. And even if it were so, optimizing for a novice instead of a long-time user is nutty. You're only a novice once, and then for a very short time. You have to spend the rest of your life as a non-novice suffering with the design decisions made for people who don't know what they're doing. It doesn't have to be this way, because you could design a program to help both sorts. But nobody does. They forget that the experienced user is more important than the novice, because his annoyance will be compounded across the time interval. If you have to design for only one, choose the real user, not the novice. If you can design for both, better yet.
The proper solution is for a program to be designed to allow the user to describe what he wants to do using a richer command set. There's a reason it's called a "point-and-drool" interface: it's been expert-proofed. Witness Motif text widgets.
You can't retrofit a keyboard-simulated mouse on an overly mousey program and ever manage Extreme Keyboarding. This takes careful design in the program so that you hit the right abstraction levels, not mere pointer emulation. We don't see much of that these days.
This is a fundamental flaw, because the designers destroyed the connection between screen motion and motion commands. They should have a follow link and a pop link stack command which are separate from the Cartesian motions. Left should move you in a negative direction along the X axis. Right should move you in a positive direction along the X axis. Up should move you in a negative direction along the Y axis. Down should move you in a positive direction along the Y axis. Anything else is madness because it's completely counterintuitive given the normal notion up up/down/left/right.
Still, it makes some situations unassailable by the legal process. I'm thinking of cases with gigabucks to tie up courts while technological changes render the matter moot.
Of course, setting up a proper SMTP gateway is something else, but that's why there's such a thing as a professional systems adminstrator.
I'm right with you on this special-purpose computer thing. It doesn't matter whether it's a VCR, a security system, my car, a calculator, or any of these exciting new gadgets coming out. But general purpose computers are different things. I wish I could find that quote from Scott McSolaris about Wintel boxes being the only computer you own that... what was it? Crashes all the time? Is too hard for you to use? Something like that.
Someone who wants to use something, including and especially a computer, without learning how to use it, is lazy, stupid, or both. Either way, he's an unhappy victim of ludicrously false expectations.
Learning is fundamental. If you don't want to learn how to fly an airplane, or can't be bothered to take the time, then get out of the fricking cockpit. Now. You're a danger to yourself and others.
My point is that the general public is filled with people who do not wish to learn. They do not have the urge to learn that you point out is needed. They do not want to be forced to take the time for it, which you point out is necessary.
Problem solving that is a pleasurable pastime for programmers and administrators is pure hell for other people. Learning may be fun for us, but it is not fun for them. This is the whole problem. They want to do things that require learning, but they want to do them without satifying those inescapable pre-requisites. They're in over their heads, because they've been sold a big lie.
Our lazy, petulant, anti-intellectual, and completely pathetic public masses demand both tasteless and microwavable TV dinners as well as the software that corresponds to them.
Somehow who hates reading, hates learning, hates puzzles, hates problem solving, and hates logic should not expect to touch a computer without a professional holding their tremulous hand. A computer is not an appliance for dummies, and if you won't pay your dues to actually invest the real time it takes to honestly learn something, you will suffer. Better to hire yourself a secretary and let him deal with it for you.
Any POSIX conformant system will have essentially the same API. By that way of thinking, OpenMVS, OpenVMS, Solaris, AIX, Irix, Tru64 Unix, BSD, Linux, and yes, even the crippled NT subsystem seems quite similar. If the Hurd attempts to conform to the POSIX spec, then it would seem very similar to Linux or Solaris or BSD, which also make the same attempt. write(2) and read(2) et alia are pretty much the same everywhere. MS-DOS, on the other hand, seems quite different, because it is not standards conforming.
Of course, to someone hacking on the kernel source code, you, Daniel, are completely correct. A regular Unix kernel hacker will look for a long time for bdevsw in something running on top of a microkernel and never find it.
It's really a matter of perspective.
The laziness you mention is just one manifestation of our "gimme-gimme, now-now" culture. Nobody wants to bother to read the manual. Nobody wants to actually have to learn anything. Delayed gratification is as welcome in the general populace as it is in your average two-year-old.
Computer use has been reduced to an unskilled labor position. That sounds funny, doesn't it? But of course, many of you doubtless say, using a computer is unskilled labor position. Surely I'm not suggesting that it ever was, or that it should be?
Why, yes; that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Think about it. It wasn't all that long ago that you'd have been regarded as either a starry-eyed lunatic or a hopeless simpleton if you had suggested that computer programming, computer administration, or computer use should be counted as unskilled labor, requiring no prior skills or special training. Today, the reverse of this occurs. To suggest that there's anything to it is to foster "elitism", a verbal icon for the tired old idea that hard work and genuine skill can ever produce more competence than can sloth and slackery. Sorry, but it's true.
What's pushing this insanity is the market economy (and the media culture). The pressure to demonstrate stellar revenue growth on each and every corporate quarterly report drives those who pander software to do completely stupid things. They have to sell their goods to people who are completely and utterly unskilled. Why? Because there are more of them, and they've got money, that's why.
Vendors cannot require even average intelligence for the learning and use of their software, lest half their market be cut off from them. Consequently, they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use, thereby restricting all of us to a childish level of interaction with our computers. It's embarrassing. Welcome to America.
It's like trying to read only comic strips and calling this literature. It's insulting. Yes, it takes time, work, and dedication to learn to read well enough to handle the Great Books rather than mere comic strips. But it's also worth it. Reduced to a level a discourse that even a quasi-illiterate child could fathom, our entire society suffers, leaving us all impoverished.
This zero-learning-curve principle for software is hardly the only force driving software manufacturers to previously unimaginable levels of idiocy, but it's a critically important, and the one which explains your own observation. Other factors include the notion that customer is always right, that more features are better, that software can in later releases have post-design features haphazardly accreted onto it like a child's fort at a junkyard, that flexible tools are only for professionals, that it's better to get a bad product out now than a good product out later, and that lack of backwards compatibility drives sales.
Our society is, as you indirectly observe, full of lazy people. They don't want to work for anything. They just want it handed to them on a silver platter, already raised and slaughtered and packaged and cooked and salted and cut up into bite-sized pieces to feed to their kiddies--and themselves.
Well, I've got sad news. Computers require skills. They do not produce jobs for unskilled laborers. But with books on the market with titles remarkably close to "Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in Five Days", or "How to Be a Concert Pianist in Ten Hours of Easy Listening", or "Wiring Your Backplane for Dummies", or "Become an Air-Traffic Controller Overnight", you see what's going on.
Computers aren't for the unskilled. It's not a television. It's not a garage door opener. Sure, you can get those things, but that's just the tip of the iceberg--the iceberg that's going to sink your boat. You can't be a systems adminstrator without prior skills. You certainly can't be a programmer without developing some serious skills. You can't even adminstrate a computer without developing serious skills.
Yet nary a day passes me by that someone whose idea of computers is limited to Word Perfect or Microsoft Word comes to me and effectively asks, "How can I use Perl to program my CGI script to handle a multistage shopping cart with distributed database connectivity, animated vector graphics, secure transactions, robustness in the face of complete systems failure, and online credit card verification -- and which scales to a thousand hits per second?" They have absolutely no programming background whatsoever. I gently (or sometimes, ungently) explain that you can't possibly teach them enough in a day, or three, for them to be able to do this, and no, there is no online tutorial either.
"But surely, computers are easy!" they retort. "The Web is therefore easy. Programming must be easy, too." This whole exchange really pisses them off. They've heard all this from millions of adverts, that anybody can do any of this, and that anybody can get rich quick without years of study. They've heard it so often that they're sure that those few of us who tell them otherwise must necessarily be lying to them. They saw it on TV, so it must be true, and we "professionals" (sorry, that's the old word; the new word is "elistist"; same thing) have to feeding them a line of bull to protect our own income streams.
When someone can't even manage to use Legos, they'll never be able to construct a skyscraper in a day or three of study. You just can't get there from here. Why do they think they should be able to? Because of the Big Lie that anyone can do anything they want with computers without learning squat. Without working. Instantly.
There's a reason people go to school for years to learn this kind of thing, and have professional internships to develop job skills. You can't just expect an illiterate street person to do this job. But people do. They really do. They think managing a computer (being a sysadmin) must be as easy as putting gas in their car, and that programming one must be as easy as adding oil to that car. Well, it isn't. This isn't unskilled labor. It never will be. Time to burst their bubble. This is the kinder thing to do than giving them false expectations of something for nothing.
It will, not, of course, happen. Corporate greed and sound-byte media coverage will see to it that the lies are left intact. But nobody will ever be happy, because lies remain lies.
I certainly hope you're wrong. I really do. And if you're not, then I wish they'd go back to Bill.
What's the problem? Well, suppose Microsoft wants to sell as much as they can. (Good bet, that.) This means they need to make their software accessible to everyone they can. That means they probably need to go at least one standard deviation below the mean. Once they get something that someone with an IQ of 85 is going to be able to be happy with, do you really think they'll bother making something for those of us who are a few stdevs out on the other end? Of course not.
That's why we're fucked.
The original wording was
It's from line 347 of the sixth Satire from Juvenal (circa 60-130 anno domini). For the curious, here's an English translation of the whole thing--since for some peculiar reason, Babelfish is completely ignorant of Latin.Then again, Juvenal was discussing women here, not spooks, and one presumes (or hopes) that these are slightly different concerns. :-)
Then again, getting thrown in jail for Contempt of Congress, Contempt of Court, or both, would probably stand a good chance of being noticed.
Secondly, is it really very surprising that they can't make it work very well on even one particular Unix system, let alone the overwhelming majority.
Finally, even if they did make it work, it would surely be nothing but yet another annoying Winix program, ranging between awkward and anathema to Unix programmers.