>From: "Christopher Cox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> </RANT>
>> There's too much (un|poorly|obscurely) documented stuff in
>> Unix/Linix. THAT makes the transition from newbie to expert
>> take longer than it should. College students have the time
>> to poke around in it 20 hours per day, but the rest of us have
>> day jobs & kids...
>> <RANT>
> <RANT>
> I find it unbelievable that a computer user expects to know how to use 300+
> programs by just walking up to a machine.
> If this where a Windows or DOS
> machine, would they really expect how to use all the programs on a store
> shelves without cracking a manual.
> </RANT>
You CAN do that with a Mac. If you need the maunal to figure it out it's a
bad program. But I think what he means is not that there is so much to
learn but that there's no clear way to learn it. You don't even know that
these tools are there, you discover them when someone on a mailing list
says:
'try # fghd -fh'
You have to learn just about everything slowly by stumbling across it. I'd
compare it to playing 'Myst' or learning how to drive by studying the
engineer's notes.
Now there's a lot of stuff to document and it's all decentralized so no one
person or company can just write a manual that covers everything. We'll
probly end up with a distributed documentation and tutorial system, a cross
between a search engine, an faq-o-matic, and a hand holding help system like
on a mac or windows.
luckily half the world's working on it.
Gavin
