Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: Computer users

Posted by Matthew Pratt on 1999-03-14

---Jimi345@xxx.xxx wrote:
>
>   I'm a newcomer to this whole guild thing, but i 

Since your new, I will point out that it is good practice to change
the subject of your reply from the digest number to something related
to your post. No big deal tho.

noticed a lot of arguments of
> Linux and Unix, vs. Microsoft.  What the programmer tends to forget
about
> computers and software, is that it's designed for people like my
mother, who
> know nothing, (I mean nothing) about computers.  My mom has trouble
using
> Microsoft Word 97, because she can't get things like the cursor to
go where
> she wants.  This is an example of what normal, and i use that term
loosely,
> people want to do with computers.  Maybe that's an extreme example,
but you
> get the point.  All that GUI stuff makes a computer look
entertaining and
> easy.  You get me?

Thats all well and good, but keep in mind that this place is more for
the power user (or aspiring power user), not the normal Joe Sixpack.
Here we _want_ to know how things work, and dont want to be restriced
to just pointing and clicking.

Now if we were being employed to write user friendly software it would
be a different story, but we are here to explore the limits of our
computers and understand the underlying technology, mainly for
personal interest (homework not included). And the best way to do this
in my personal opinion is to have the source code, and so linux fits
the bill perfectly (no pun intented).

Perhaps if you wanted entertainment you should have bought a Nintendo
or Playstation, or if thats not your style, you could surf right on
out and back over to yahoo, where you can point 'n' click your little
heart out. In the mean time, those of us who are serious will be
playing around with our 'nix boxes and our command lines and creating
software that we can use (and not worrying about petty little "This
program has performed an illegal operation!" dialog boxes).

Now after all that ranting its ironic that I have been working on a
little app for myself called GTKRemotePPPLoad that has a GUI. Those
intersted can find it on my home page (screen shot there too ;-):

http://members.xoom.com/mattpratt/


==
Matty 

email - mattpratt@xxxxx.xxx
"Learn the console, become 1 with it, it is 0."
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