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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!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!sprint!uunet!in1.uu.net!199.242.16.13!news4.ixa.net!ixa.net!nwnews.wa.com!brokaw.wa.com!not-for-mail From: tzs@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD (or something else?) Date: 17 Apr 1997 23:16:45 -0700 Organization: Northwest Nexus Inc. Lines: 33 Message-ID: <5j73kd$pbe$1@halcyon.com> References: <slrn5kaf5t.11r.c_chaos@chaosnet.wahnapitae.on.ca> <3345FD90.4A3@kashmir.net> <5ipv9f$itd$1@halcyon.com> <5iqpqu$kfm$1@hecate.umd.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au alt.os.linux:20257 comp.os.linux.misc:170449 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:39270 Marat Fayzullin <marat@Glue.umd.edu> wrote: >Yes to all questions above, including the toilet flushing. An *educated* >human being must be aware of these things, or at least of some of them. Some of them, but not all. >The "I wanna it to work, but don't wanna know how it works" is an attitude >of an arrogant ignorant idiot taking everything around him for granted. No, it's the attitude of someone who has better things to do. E.g., I don't know much about how my refrigerator works beyond what I can figure out from what I remember from when I took thermodynamics at Caltech. I *could* learn a lot more about refrigerators, but the list of things I'd like to know more about is long enough that I will not be able to get to everything on it before I die. Hence, some things, like refrigerators, go on the second list: things that I can learn enough about to use, but for which I'll hire someone else to deal with if I need something else done with. I don't see any reason why some people should not have computers on their second list. What I find kind of funny is that programmers will spend a lot of effort designing objects or modules (or whatever the unit of encapsulation is in the language they are using) so as to hide from other objects or modules or whatever the need to understand how they work, but then when it is time to think of their program as a whole, the whole idea of modules or objects or whatever goes down the toilet, and they stick on some stupid interface that expects the user to understand how the program works in order to use it. If they would just keeping thinking in object oriented terms a little bit longer, they'd realize that the user should only have to know *what* the program does, not *how* it does it. --Tim Smith