From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 95 09:12:13 PST
To: Kevin Marcus <datadec@cs.ucr.edu>
Subject: Re: Clinton freezes U.S. assets of Mideast groups
In-Reply-To: <199501260357.TAA07311@cs.UCR.EDU>
Message-ID: <9501261711.AA16623@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Kevin Marcus says:
> Unfortunately, however, there are a lot of things that a lot of people can't
> do in a unix system.  Unix is probably the most widely used unfriendly
> cryptic, and complicated operating system today.

Unix is perfectly easy to use. Its no worse than DOS.

I'm constantly amazed by people saying "why, Unix is so unfriendly!
What does "ls" mean to a naive user". Well, what does "dir" mean to a
naive user? Since when is "dir" the intuitive way to list the contents
of something?

Now, its true that Windows is friendlier than DOS, but there are good
windowing systems on Unix that provide equally easy to use front ends.

Anyone who claims that "Unix" is unfriendly hasn't looked at the
machine that they are using -- or they are bigots who think that the
strange commands that they know are natural whereas other people's are
magically unnnatural.

> With the upcoming of
> Linux, this will probably change somewhat in the future, but until I can
> teach my secretary how she can use latex to type and print her letters, we
> are going to be stuck with getting us whatever the bastards at MicroSoft
> think we want.

Teach her how to use FrameMaker, or IslandWrite, or something
similar. IslandWrite is no more unfriendly than MacWrite was. If you
want to teach her to use latex, thats actually quite feasable, but its
not needed.

Perry