> Ummm we have a couple of user groups here ... > developers/power users > ho want scriptablity > and power, casual users and newbies who want ease > of use. > A developer/power user will go gaga over the > power, flexibility, > etailed output and scriptability > that cdrecord and mkisofs provide. All sorts of > automation using > remote terminals, expect, > distributed CD burning and what not ... wow wow! > Casual users, OpenSolaris newbies including people > used to other OSes > ike, Windows, MacOSx, > Linux couldn't care less about UDF, lofi, Joliet, > Rock Ridge ... All > hey want to do is pop in a > blank CD, grab a bunch of files, drop them into a > window and voila - > hey get written with all the > correct joliet-what and rock-what formatting. And > what did you say > bout some tty thingy ... well > do you mean those little green screens with lots > of letters with > erious faced white robed guys poring > over them ... um uh oh ... well lets see wasn't > that decades ago ... > think I will go back to good ol' > Windows.
Moinak, I urge you to think carefully one more time about what you've written (an excellent reply BTW). The number of true IT experts and professionals is dwindling exponentially every day. Over here I've got bakers and train drivers and construction workers being hired into IT to write web applications based on Oracle databases! I've got people working as Oracle DBAs on Solaris not knowing how to set up a PATH variable properly! I've got people doing Oracle who don't know how to use RMAN or RAC, let alone know what ZFS is, and that Solaris now runs on the i86pc platform! How many Jeff Bonwicks and Adam Leventhals and Moinak Goshes and Joerg Schillings do you think are left in the world? And how many of them are outside of that small concentrated spot called Menlo Park, CA? Can we dumb things down? Why yes of course we can. Any good engineer can! But what will happen when Jeff Bonwick retires? Or Moinak Ghosh? Or when Joerg ends up in a nursing home? If we don't educate the public, this knowledge will be lost. Who then will be left to develop advanced technologies, to push computer science forward, to have an understanding of why things were implemented the way they were? Just look "around you" on this mailing list. How many "newbies" do we see daily complaining why some feature XYZ from their Linux distro isn't present, only because they don't know System V and therefore don't know it's already been there for DECADES? How many people do we have asking about GNU functionality not being present inside of System V tools, because they don't have the knowledge and experience to understand that the point *is not* implementing tools within other tools, but stringing the tools together for maximum flexibility? My point is, quite simply, if we dumb everything down, once we're gone, the knowledge and experience might very well be lost. Forever. And I dread to imagine what IT and CS will look like without it. It's turning into a nightmare already. So this approach of "dumbing things down" for the "newbie" can very well turn to be the undoing of IT and CS. Who will be left to work on all this advanced stuff if we raise a generation of "clicky-bunty" masses? It's already a bad, bad problem today. What will it look like in ten or twenty years from now? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
