On Thursday 29 May 2003 14:23, Herouth Maoz wrote: > Yep. Well, you know what I mean. Think about it - humans did not always > deal with the magical world of virtuality. You have a herd of cows. You > milk the first one. Of course your intuition recognizes that Edna, Bossie, > Hemda etc. are all objects of class Cow. But in real life, that merely > means that you have to do with Bossie the same that you did with Edna. It's > not enough to milk the first cow, and then say "Now let's call this > operation "milking", and apply it to all the cows". You actually have to > sit down, and plug them one by one to the milking machine.
But you only memorize the milking process once, right? You don't ask a dairy farmer if he knows how to milk Edna, unless there's something very special about her. You ask him if he knows how to milk a cow, in general. And if he answers that he does, you deduce that as a private case, he can milk Edna or Bossie. So that there is a benefit to thinking in generalized ways. (Pop science says generalization and abstraction are what human language is based on, so they're basic ways of thinking common to all humans.) Here there is even a bigger benefit, because it would make the actual milking process per cow shorter and simpler, so we should try to do it - that is, try to get people to generalize. This is abusing your comparison, but suppose you had built a robot for milking cows. To make it work, it has to be brought to a cow and told: "This is a cow. Milk it." The cow's name mustn't be used, because the robot doesn't know about names. Well, by your logic, people could never generalize enough that the process of milking a cow would deal with the abstract notion of _a_ cow and not with specific live cows. So, only specially trained robot handlers who can think in abstractions would be able to use this robot. I don't think things are quite that bad :-) > > So, to most people, having a "smaller header like the one I already did in > page one", means remembering what your operations were at the time, and > repeating them. So yes, it's Arial, Bold, 16pts every single time. Or if > they are smarter, they use that "style copy and paste" magic tool. So why can't it be "mark as style = heading3" every time? They don't really understand what they do or how it works in any case. It's just a matter of getting used to a different interface - and then there's a big saving of effort since everyone's output looks the same via a common document class, and noone spends time manually formatting fonts to reach the same result, or even thinking about fonts at all. Tell the user: when you want a big heading, select 'heading1' from this list. When you want a small heading, select 'heading2'. When you want normal text, select 'standard'. Then when you print the file, it will magically all be correct. Just forget about the fonts. Don't worry about them. Don't tell me a user can't follow simple instructions like that. Even if he doesn't actually understand what's behind these actions, he can still follow orders and memorize simple actions. Which is not so different from what happened the first time he used msword. And there is a big advantage - he saves time _and_ the output is a lot better _and_ if we, the knowledgeable people, want different-looking output we can get it easily. > > I think this issue goes well beyond the subject of word processors. It > bears on the whole Linux-on-desktop issue. As programmers, we make lousy > design decisions for "consumer products". Bad interfaces, features which > are not understandable to the user. We keep forgetting that the user wants > to do what he's good at, not what *we* are good at. This is why we have > such excellent server programs as Apache, Samba etc. etc., but the desktops > look like bad Windows look-alikes, and the applications are worse. So you don't think we can or should go for linux on the desktop for non-programmers? The whole point of lyx is that it's a new, better idiom. Better than msword and all the apps that are, just as you say, bad msword look-alikes. But then you say people can't be retrained to use it. That means there's no point in linux on the desktop. It also seems to mean the bad MS interfaces are the only ones "ordinary" people can get used to. I don't want to believe that. Those interfaces are bad objectively, not just for programmers. "Ordinary" people using them suffer and waste time and resources, too. -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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