Re: The Linux Revolution: What Happened?

From: Jeff (jeff_at_naol.com)
Date: 08/01/05 

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 00:06:12 -0400

"Tobias Brox" <tobias@stud.cs.uit.no> wrote in message
news:dck26d$h4m$1@news.uit.no...
> [Jeff]
>> It seems to me that more control, more stability and security are what
>> everyone would consider good things to have.
> [...]
>> And the text
>> interface is always there for those who feed their egos by their memory
>> of
>> arcane commands - all of which should be able to be just as well accessed
>> with a good graphic interface. After all, even the text command is an
>> interface.
>
> Maybe I'm entirely arcane, but for me text interface is the only
> interface that gives me control and flexibility. There are just so
> many things you can't easily do using a point-and-click interface -
> just the simplest thing of it all, pressing Ctrl-R to search for the
> command history and repeating (eventually slightly modifying) an
> earlier typed command - there is no such equivalent with
> point-and-click interfaces.

Yet .......

> After all, what one needs for having control of the computer is a
> basic ability to program - and as far as I know, there are no good
> programming languages as of today that doesn't rely on a text
> interface. Bash is as much a programming langauge as an interface for
> launching programs. Of course, one have to be very skilled to take
> full advantage of it, but there is quite some simple stuff that can be
> done by ordinary people; i.e. chaining commands, i.e. "copy images
> from camera; start image viewer" or "copy images from camera to disk;
> burn images to CD".

And these simple commands can be made even more accessible through a GUI,
plus others even less simple.

> The first digital camera I had was boundled with some software for
> transfering images to the computer; it was crap. It was a
> point-and-click interface, and for every image it downloaded, the
> image would pop up at the screen disturbing whatever kind of work I
> was trying to do. The program had options for "take image" and "delete
> image from camera", but I didn't see the point at all, it was much
> faster to do those operations from the camera itself than to do it
> through the mouse and the program. But then I found a command line
> tool for it, I got an idea, and within a minute I had set up a loop
> "take picture; transfer image to web; delete image from camera; sleep
> 30" - and presto, I had a web camera throwing live pictures at the
> web. How do you do that with a point-and-click interface?

By creating a gui that allows easy macro creation. All these options can be
included in a gui with selection boxes. Gui is just an interface, just as
text is an interface for assembly.

I think
> the average windows user would search for a separate "webcam"-program
> to do that. Now, if the camera can be accessed through the command
> line, it's not needed to be any expert to fix the 5-line webcam
> program above - but as long as the camera can only be accessed through
> pointing and clicking (or the buttons at the camera itself), one will
> need an expert to fix the task.

Modern Linux distribution permits both: the text interface for those who
want it and the gui for those who need it.

> Or, when my wife wants to send pictures by email, she carefully
> selects the fotos she wants to send, open each and one of them in
> photoshop, asks fotoshop to resize the photo, and sends it. That's
> the typical point-and-click way of doing things - maybe there exists
> some smart functionality in photoshop for "resize n photos" or some
> other applications for this, but that's not the point. When I do the
> same operation, I use command-line tools for resizing the photo, even
> if the command works for a single photo at a time, it's completely
> trivial to fix "resize all the selected photos" in one go, not having
> to do repeated time-consuming work (that's what we have the computer
> for, after all, isn't it?).
>
> It seems to me that most people, even including quite some
> computer-literate people, consider point-and-click interfaces to be
> much easier to use than the command line. Yes, indeed, doing advanced
> stuff on the command line does require some knowledge, and manual
> pages are quite often difficult to digest - but the simplest of the
> simple - to launch an application - well, if I come to a computer
> where I expect "firefox" to be installed, all I have to do is to type
> "firefox" in a terminal window. That's not difficult, and it does not
> take much time to do. Searching for the right place to click with the
> mouse can be very time-consuming and frustrating.

Variety is the spice of life. To each his own. Does not need to be one or
the other. Can have both options. Likke the choice between automatic
transmission and stick. One gives more control b ut has a greater learning
curve. The buyer decides what is best for him/her.

Jeff

> --
> Tobias Brox, Tromsų, Arctic Norway

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