Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!worldnet.att.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!128.138.240.25!boulder!rintintin.Colorado.EDU!fcrary
From: fcrary@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Frank Crary)
Newsgroups: alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD (or something else?)
Date: 9 Apr 1997 01:37:24 GMT
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 52
Message-ID: <5iersk$33j@lace.colorado.edu>
References: <slrn5kaf5t.11r.c_chaos@chaosnet.wahnapitae.on.ca> <3347ce19.0@news.intercenter.net> <33482725.774320915@news.diac.com> <334a495a.0@news.intercenter.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rintintin.colorado.edu
NNTP-Posting-User: fcrary
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au alt.os.linux:20012 comp.os.linux.misc:168845 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38758
In article <334a495a.0@news.intercenter.net>,
Ron Bickers <rbickers@intercenter.net> wrote:
>: >How many of our mothers know how a car works under the hood? How many care
>: >how it works? How many don't deserve to drive a car because they don't
>: >know how it works?
>: (1) The analogy isn't (IMHO) a very good one. The features in a given
>Fine. Those things never are really on target, are they. I think you
>know the point I'm making, however. I never said it was a good thing, but
>many people don't care how stuff works, they just want their "picture to come
>out on that printer, just like it looks on the screen." That's not always a
>bad thing though either.
In an ideal world, no, that wouldn't be a bad thing at all. In practice,
there simply are not any perfect operating systems. So sometimes the
picture isn't going to come out exactly the way it looks on the
screen (or some other, similar expectation isn't going to be met.)
The Microsoft operating systems try to make everything transparent
to the user, and easy to use. That means the user doesn't have to
learn anything about how the computer works, but also can't do much
about it if things don't work. Given the frequency with which
Windows 95 does odd things, I don't see this as a good solution
(even for users who don't really want to learn how the system works.)
Unix operating systems, and the *BSD ones in particular, aren't
all that easy to use but the user can see what is going on. That
means the user ends up learning something about how things work,
and can fix a problem if things don't work right. Unless the user
strongly objects to learning how the computer works, I think that's
a better solution. Take a problem my mother is having with her
computer, running Windows 95: Sometimes, she wants to shut down the
computer, but the shutdown procedure won't let her because there
are active processes. There shouldn't be, and she's exited from all
the programs she's been using. That doesn't leave her with many
choices other than just turning off the power or hitting reset,
which isn't a very good idea in general. The same thing occasionally
happens to me on a Unix machine: I try to log out, and am told that
I still have something running in the background, when there shouldn't
be any such process. My solution is to use 'ps' and find the process in
question, then use 'kill' (or 'kill -9') to get rid of it. I mentioned
that to her, and she said that she wished that she could do exactly
the same thing with Windows 95. Now, she doesn't have any interest
at all in learning about the operating system, and figuring out
how to use 'ps' and 'kill', with all the appropriate flags, would
be a pain for her. But she thinks it would be worth it, in order
to deal with a moderately common problem. "The computer did something
wrong and there is nothing you can do about it" is more frustrating
than, "The computer did something wrong and you'll have to learn to
use a few commands if you want to fix it."
Frank Crary
CU Boulder