Randall R Schulz wrote: > On Tuesday 26 December 2006 09:14, jdd wrote: >> >> when you buy a car, you may have a licence, and this mean >> you may have learned to drive it > > Of course. But once you've learned to drive, the knowledge you have is > pretty much equally applicable to all cars out there. They're very > complicated devices, but the cockpit interface is highly standardized.
And they're only designed to do one thing - transport you and your goods from one place to another. A desktop computer is designed for a far more complex and varied set of tasks. Say from helping someone write the Linux kernel to enable someone to listen to a CD. > And no one is required to know about how modern (or even primitive) > automobile technologies really work. They rightly expect to buy a car, > fuel it up, drive it around, give it periodic maintenance and > occasional repair (it's a mechanical device, and wear and failure are > inevitable) and that's it. > > We should subject our information technology to at least this level of > expectation. Yeah. And in all the specialised cases we do. The dishwasher, the car, the HD-recorder, the TV, the timer for the Christmas light, the Sudoku handheld game I just bought for Christmas. But when you want a general computing device such as a desktop computer, it's just not possible, IMHO. Well, not without driving the prices skyhigh. > There certainly is an issue of expectations management, but remember, > this all started out by me saying that I thought the software > profession has not done a good enough job. And it hasn't. I think that should be the software industry, not the profession. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- http://www.spamchek.com/ - managed email security. Starting at SFr4/user/month. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
