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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 01:55:49 GMT
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <5iesv5$3lr@lace.colorado.edu>
References: <slrn5kaf5t.11r.c_chaos@chaosnet.wahnapitae.on.ca> <3347ce19.0@news.intercenter.net> <5i9h5g$et4@lace.colorado.edu> <y5alo6v5zxn.fsf@graphics.cat.nyu.edu>
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NNTP-Posting-User: fcrary
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au alt.os.linux:20013 comp.os.linux.misc:168847 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38760
In article <y5alo6v5zxn.fsf@graphics.cat.nyu.edu>,
David Fox <fox@c a t . n y u . e d u> wrote:
>Complaining about ignorant users is the lamest sort of denial of the
>failure of software designers to produce usable systems.
Interesting. But it doesn't have much to do with what I wrote. (I
assume you were replying to my comments, since that's how the header
reads...) I was complaining about ignorant users and systems (or
software) that wasn't absolutely perfect. Absolutely perfect
systems don't exist, and none of the existing ones even come
close. Some things will and do go wrong, and that has nothing
to do with "usable" systems. Even very user friendly programs
like Word Perfect still do odd things sometimes. The problem
is how the user deals with occasional problems in an otherwise
"usable system". The Microsoft operating systems, and many of
the more user friendly software packages, try to create an illusion
of perfection by making as much of the inner workings transparent
to the users. This makes it difficult for a user to fix a problem
when it comes up, and creates an attitude that the user doesn't
need to know how to fix problems. Since problems do come up,
even in the best software (i.e. since no software package or
operating system is absolutely perfect), I find this to be
harmful.
>...There is no
>important task for a user of word processing software to do except to
>process words. For it to require anything else of them is a failure
>of the program's designer.
Fine. The program's designer has failed to do an absolutely perfect
job. Does this surprise you? Without absolute perfection (which
describes all existing software: I've even had vi fail on me once...)
the word processor has to process words _and_ deal with the limits
of software that is not absolutely perfect. Simply holding up your
hands and saying, "The computer ate my file, oh well..." isn't
a viable attitude. It isn't even necessarily a sign of a software problem:
the user might have slipped and clicked "No" instead of "Yes" when
asked "Do you want to save changes before exiting?" When something
goes wrong, the user needs to thing in terms of "Why did this
happen and what can I do to avoid this problem in the future."
A user that thinks the computer just does random things sometimes,
and that's just life, isn't going to do that, and won't learn from
their own mistakes.
Frank Crary
CU Boulder