[H-GEN] Re: Unix vs NT [long; both informative and then religious]

[Anthony Towns]

On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 12:40:56AM +1000, Doug Young wrote:
> When one has acquired a library of stuff that would equip a small university
> and has been trying for some years to make sense out of the available
> documentation there is obviously something lacking in the way concepts are
> presented

...or in the way concepts are perceived.

(a) Stop blaming everyone and everything else.

(b) No, most of us aren't saying what you want to hear. Start listening
to what we are saying on the offchance that maybe we've been there before
and what we've got to say might actually be more useful than what you
want to hear.

>  -----  how acceptable would an operators manual be for any other
> technical device on this the planet if it was as obtuse and uninformative as
> the typical MAN / HOWTO ??

(c) The rhetoric's cute, but, well, I'm not sure what planet you're from,
but on mine, we're lucky to get a couple of pages of broken english telling
you how to press play let alone an even moderately organised collection of
tutorials and references for the entire system.

> The proof that many people find this stuff extremely difficult to comprehend
> is seen in the number of publications available in bookshops and the number
> of newsgroups devoted to various aspects of the *nixes.

(d) And the complete lack of books about Windows and kin proves what, by
contrast?

(e) Rhetoric is cuter when it's at least superficially true.

> Maybe the faithful
> accept this as acceptable ..... maybe its even seen as desirable (after all
> we don't want too many of those dreaded newbies actually figuring this stuff
> out !!!! .... or at least not without experiencing as much trauma as
> possible)

(f) "I wanna drive!" "You can't drive until you learn the road rules and
how to handle a car." "But I wanna drive *now*." "Well, I'm sorry, but
you can't."

(g) "I wanna get a gun and shoot things!" ...

(h) "I wanna connect my business to the Internet!" ...

The analogy isn't actually as trite and far fetched as it might
seem. That's the first thing you need to learn --- firewalls and such
aren't an optional extra, they're a *necessity*, at least if you have
anything worth protecting on your internal network.

(i) Consider also that none of us are paid to answer questions on
mailing lists. That doesn't make any help free, it just means the cost is
different. In this case you have to adopt the philosophies of "thinking
for yourself before asking for help", and "preferring to know as much
about everything as possible, rather than the minimum necessary to get
something working".

That doesn't mean you have to read books until you sweat blood or anything,
but it does mean you have to be willing to stop and think about what you've
been told, rather than just deirde this that and the other when you don't
get instant satisfaction.

(j) This is all free software. If you think you've got a valid complaint
about lack of documentation, put your time or your money where your mouth
is and either write some better stuff, or pay someone else to. Every
now and then you get people saying that the savings paying $10 for a
Linux CD over $800 or whatever for an NT license is nothing, it's the
other costs that matter; if you think Linux is stable and all, but under
documented pay someone your $790 of nothing to write some documentation
that's satisfactory and let the next poor soul get an easier ride. That's
what free software's about.

Cheers,
aj, who thinks you get more complaints about how hard stuff is to use now
    that there are graphical tools for most of this, compared to back in
    the good ol' days when there weren't.

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.

 ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it 
        results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
                                        -- Linus Torvalds
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