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Girl brains and boy brains are different and despite years of rude comments girls multi task and boys dont. Girls *seem* to prefer GUIs. Any comments ?
<snip> OK...I'll bite....speaking on behalf of myself (more in the old fart rather than girls category), I recall sitting for hours at a Macintosh (circa 1988) trying to figure out how to change a file's name. I recalled shells in Unix from a BSc in Comp Sci.(circa 1980). In the intervening years, I managed the replacement of a Card Punch with a Northstar PC (running CPM). I wrote econometric modelling programs in Fortran (which included programming memory management and for those who don't know the structure of Fortran is based on the 80 column cards) to run on a Cyber 76 - which could explain my "non-standard brain" when it came to intuition about the Macintosh interface. Circa 1988, I had to evaluate and recommend a word processing package for use on PCs across an organisation and recommended the MS Office (GUI) package over, from memory, Wordperfect (while I was testing it, I couldn't figure out how to save my document), Amipro (had all kinds of great features if you were writing your PhD and Lotus (being my own preference, at the time, for analysing and presenting graphs of growth in email use and which I had to continue to use because my requirements exceeded the MSExcel (GUI) memory limitations. All the while, the Unix saga (of competing flavours of proprietary Unix) continued ...in 2004, I switched to Linux (from Win95) and open source for my new laptop (this involved selecting a distro and loading it myself. I even purchased the SLUG endorsed Debian distro but couldn't get that to work. I drop down to a root terminal to use ftp... and some of the packages like kino and k3b, because I can't be bothered figuring out the security configuration, to give them access to the hardware but in the main, I have been using KDE and GUI based packages in the main.....and now on my new netbook (which shipped with Linux!) - Gnome. My conclusion, based on the discussion here, is that while there are still shells in Unix (as there were in DOS), the GUI/Desktops appear not to have been implemented as Shells....though we may yet see MSWindows released as a "Linux shell".... Further the GUI, mouse, email and spread sheet (particularly the graphing capabilities) are great inventions. However, you don't want to know the tasks, I have tackled today some while constructing this email.... or perhaps it shows. Marghanita -- Marghanita da Cruz http://www.ramin.com.au Phone: (+61)0414 869202 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
