Tips for installing windows and freeBSD both.. anyone??

[Bruce Cran]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 13:51:22 -0700
Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:

> I choose a little up-front learning curve for massive efficiency and
> productivity enhancements down the road.  The increased efficiency of
> a minimal, composable toolset driven by the keyboard can be a huge
> win in long-term productivity for one motivated to learn how to use
> it, as well as a major savings on system resources (and hardware
> costs, since upgrades do not need to happen as often, nor be as
> cutting-edge).
> 
> Others choose some inefficiency in the long run to avoid having to
> learn anything new up front.  The increased discoverability, at least
> for simple tasks, of a point-and-click interface tends to seem more
> "intuitive" and familiar to people just coming to a new system for the
> first time, makes task completion easier to figure out the first time
> (and the thirtieth, since point-and-click interfaces tend to require
> figuring out the same tasks over and over again).

With the command-line you also choose the inefficiency of having to
read the man page every time you want to do something you're not
familiar with. Well-designed UIs allow you to easily discover how to do
it without resorting to the Help file - and since people tend to have
good visual memories they can remember it better than a string of
characters. A good example of this is Subversion tagging/branching: in
Windows I can use the menu option "TortoiseSVN -> branch/tag..." to
create a branch and have it done in a minute. Using the command-line
I'd have to spend time reading up on the commandline parameters to
achieve the same thing, since it's something I only do about once a
year or so.

-- 
Bruce Cran