[K12OSN] Greg reminds us to taste the soup

[Dan Young]

On 6/26/07, Huck <dhuckaby at paasda.org> wrote:
> I tasted the soup...it was bitter, so I went back to the CLI ;)
> so far I've yet to see many GUI tools that do things faster than
> someone who knows what they are doing on a CLI...
>
> then again my summarized feelings about GUI's are that they are handicap
> devices to proliferate ignorance about HOW things work within an OS...

Abstractions are _good_. Otherwise we'd all be telnetting to port 25
to send email. Here, let me netcat some handwritten XML to post to a
blog.

> If the technology co-ordinator in the article is not interested in
> LEARNING the technology...what's he doing in that roll?

Go read it again. The tech coordinator was saying that his
_science_teacher_user_ wants to remove a package from their Fedora
system.

This is precisely the kind of thing that GUIs should make dead-simple.
You don't do it that often, and a little discoverability/handholding
is nice.

Please remember that for the vast majority of the world's computer
users, system administration is _not_ their core competency, nor
should it be. Lord knows we need those people to focus on the real
work at hand of educating our children, not distract them with
administrivia.

"'yum remove foo' you dummy" is _not_ the right answer here.

-- 
Dan Young <dyoung at mesd.k12.or.us>
Multnomah ESD - Technology Services
503-257-1562