nevermind "vast experience in the real world," i make no such claim. people like yourself obviously believe that making a solution is great, regardless of ease of use. and it is. and i'm not into a pissing contest. i'm just speaking from experience.
and i claim no "superiority" for stating that ease-of-use is more important than a neat hack. but your point that it's an arbitrary requirement is specious. and when i said "scale" i didn't mean the solution, i meant YOU. YOU DON'T SCALE. that's why the "freebie i'll administer and fix it myself all the time" solution won't work once you get past more than a few boxes. right now, from your point of view, you think my argument is ridiculous, because "linux is fun!" let's see you say that same assertion in ten years, when you're up to *here* with linux. since this discussion was originally about setting up a VPN, and *my* assertion that a small, cheap, point-and-drool Linksys box is most of the time better than a cobbled-together linux box, i can distill my whole argument/rant into the following: making a solution that works for other geeks is no great achievement, you just have to look at all the stillborn projects on freshmeat and sourceforge. because geeks can take care of themselves; they can peek at the source code if your documentation is inadequate or nonexistent; they can even fix things you might have left broken. but making a solution that works for the vast unwashed point-and-drool masses, that *IS* a great achievement. only a few companies have managed to do that with linux: philips (tivo), linksys, a few others. how about this: with all the geeks working on KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and what-not, how come it only took a year and a rather small team inside Apple to come up with the MacOS X GUI, which everybody acclaims as the best GUI for UNIX? so OBVIOUSLY there are quite a few people who think ease-of-use is interesting. AND, obviously, there are areas where the "free hacker ethic" falls down. GNOME is great, sure. i love it (because i don't have MacOS X..) if you think i'm trying to piss higher on the wall, or i'm bitter about something, then sure you can live with your ideas of what i'm trying to do. but i do hope someone on this list gets my point: it's no big achievement to make something other geeks will like. but making something for the "masa," that's something noteworthy. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
