IE in FreeBSD?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Frank Jahnke
>Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 9:58 AM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: youshi10 at u.washington.edu; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: RE: IE in FreeBSD?
>
>
>>
>> An alternative always exists.
>
>It depends on how far you want to go with alternatives.  Sure, you could
>keep a Windows box around.  You could not do the task.  Those too are
>alternatives.  But if you are looking to do certain tasks on a BSD
>desktop, I will say that in many cases there is no alternative, at least
>no alternative that is workable.
>
>One example: how do you suggest that complex forms in PDF format are
>filled out and saved on a FreeBSD system?
>

PDF doesn't belong in complex forms that are filled out online.  I use
PDF at my job and we use it for one use only - contracts.  A contract
must be in paper with a human's signature on it to have any validity
whatsoever in a court of law, despite what you may read otherwise.  The
PDF forms we send out are NOT intended to be filled out and printed, they
are designed to be printed only, then the printout filled out and signed
by hand.  And we have alternative formats available (such as word doc)
for those who don't have Acrobat loaded.  I'd send these out in .png
format
if I figured the user could print them off without botching the printout.
Or in PostScript to be fed directly to the printer.

Every other type of form we deal with that doesn't have to stand up to
legal scrutiny (ie: needs a siggy) we have long ago migrated to online
webforms.


>>
>> Look at Macintosh software sometime, the UI for most apps is little
>> different
>> than what it was under System 7 except more colorful and glitzy.  Most
>> Mac users don't even know UNIX is involved with their OS.
>The Mac isn't
>> a gateway to UNIX by any means.  Apple made it easy for Mac users to
>> continue to be stone stupid, and the Mac users by and large chose to
>> stay stone stupid.  Apple knows it's customer base that's for sure.
>
>I find this attitude to be very distressing, but remarkably common.
>Sure, users are not as informed as they might be, and they can do stupid
>things.  But they use the computer as a tool to do certain tasks, and
>they shouldn't have to know about how the computer works to accomplish
>those tasks.
>

Yah yah yah.  I hear the same thing about cars - "we shouldn't need to
know how a car works to drive it"  Sure - sounds great.  Let's put a
bunch
of drivers on the road that don't understand bullcrap about automobile
suspensions and how they work then watch them kill themselves the first
time it snows and freezes up.  Oh I forgot, that's what we already have.
Great attitude!

>My own work is in biological physical chemistry -- that's what pays the
>bills.  Should I require my IT people to be conversant with that area,
>and understand the experiments that we do?

Yes.  There's a big difference between being 'conversant' in a field
and being 'qualified' in a field.  I would expect the IT people that
are servicing an accounting company to have a basic idea of accounting,
and the IT people supporting a food company to have a basic understanding
of how the food industry works.  Otherwise how can they possibly be
effective at providing applications to the users that the users need?

You may as a car driver not be qualified to take apart the front
suspension of a vehicle and repair it.  You may not even be qualified
to diagnose something as simple as a wheel shimmy caused by a loose
tie rod.  You might not know the difference between a tie rod and a
tied shoe.  But you don't need any of that to understand some basic
things like if the tire isn't straight up and down that it's not
gripping the road well enough, (ie: front end misalignment) and that if
the
vehicle has a lift kit on it and is jacked up into God's ass that it's
probably a lot easier to roll it over (ie: center of gravity) and
that a locked up tire skidding has less traction than a turning
tire that's braking (ie: Antilock Braking Systems)

  Unless you understand the basics of how the suspension
works, your a hazard to yourself and other drivers when your on the
road.  And that is true even if it's broad daylight sunny weather.

>
>Indeed, the tools I am developing are designed so that the user does not
>have to know all of the details about how they work.  They put stuff in,
>and get useful information out.

If they don't know how these tools work then how do they know if the tool
is working properly?

>If I had to hire Maxwell's demons to do
>the work, the users wouldn't care.  It is my job to do the hard work and
>tailor it to their needs.

And as the tool user it's their job to have enough understanding of what
your tools are supposed to be spitting out as to recognize when you screw
it up and your tools give out bogus results.

It's like teaching mathematics in school.  You can teach the kids to do
addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by hand, so they
understand
what is going on, or you can teach them to use a calculator.  If you do
what
your advocating you get great calculator users out of the mill but to
them
the calculator is just a black box, they have learned to use the tool but
nothing about mathematics.

>
>I think your view on how computers are used is very limited.  You seem
>to view computers from an IT-department perspective.

And just a bit earlier your making the argument that IT needs to mind the
computers and you need to not know anything about IT?  How does that
jive?  If your going to be deliberately ignorant of IT then who are you
to tell IT how you want your computer system setup?  Shut your mouth
and do as the IT department tells you to do.  That's the best way
according to you.

> That's fine, of
>course.  My view is limited as well to things I need in a scientific,
>engineering and laboratory environment.  And that world is far more
>diverse than simply running MS Office or OO.o.

But you don't have jack squat to say about how the computers work in
that world, remember, since you are arguing that your supposed to be
stupid and dumb when it comes to how a computer works.

>That's the least of my
>worries, though even here compatibility issues do come up.
>
>It seems that you are arguing the BSDs (Free, Net, Open and so on)
>should be used only for servers (and perhaps a few other applications
>like embedded systems), and to leave the desktop to the Mac and Windows.

No, you are missing the point totally.  I'm arguing that the so-called
"desktop" isn't important.  The desktop needs to serve as a portal to
the real applications and processing, which is centralized.  It is a
means to an end, not an end itself.  The servers in the center that are
doing the Really Important Work are of course all FreeBSD.  If Microsoft
wants to spend it's life writing goopy gimpy winders that runs on the
latest Far East dreck, more power to them as long as they put a decent
networking stack in the thing so that my xterms don't get disconnected
all the time.

>
>I also think the emphasis on bespoke software as opposed to "consumer"
>software to be misplaced.  Programmers are expensive, and in my opinion
>many software titles are remarkable values.  I'm very pleased to be able
>to distribute the cost of software development across a wider community
>without shouldering it all myself.  Many of these titles are for things
>that the OSS community is frankly not interested in, many times not even
>aware of, and probably never will be written.  One example: an
>electronic laboratory notebook that complies with FDA tracability and
>data integrity requirements.
>

You see this is a perfect example once again.  Why do you need
traceability and
data integrity on a notebook?  Because there's data there!!  Move the
data to a central location and the notebook becomes a dumb window with
no data on it, and there's no need to pay attention to the notebook.

Do we put alarms on the window frames in the museums?
No, we alarm the actual paintings themselves, not the windows people
look through to see the paintings.

An OSS operating system like FreeBSD or Linux is not just only good
as a platform for running
OSS applications.  It's good for that but it's just as good for
running the kind of narrow market, sophisticated and expensive
applications
your talking about.  The goal needs to be to knock some sense into
the ISVs that produce those applications and tell them you aren't
going to buy those apps unless they port to FreeBSD.  It shouldn't be
to say "Oh, those poor babies life is so hard for them, let's make
it easy for them to say on their fat lazy asses and not bestir themselves
to bother porting to the operating system WE want"

>Finally, I think the implied position that a product like CrossOver
>Office will bring down the whole OSS movement to be horribly overblown.

So do I.  I think your getting yourself too puffed up - I never said
that Crossover Office would bring down the whole OSS movement.  Sheesh!

>There currently is no desktop BSD market.  If anything, getting people
>like me to use it will help more software titles to become available for
>it, which can only be a good thing.  I understand your position, but
>here I think we have to agree to disagree.

I don't agree with that.  I think we just disagree, period.  It's a
shame these days that people have so little respect for someone else's
point of view that they are more concerned with the feelings of the
person than the actual ideas of that person.  I think you've been
around those government shirts too long, you've been contaminated
by political correctness.  Tell me, do you really believe in anything
anymore or is everything just shades of gray to you?  Sorry
though I forgot the words to Kumbiya.

Jesus, at least call me an asshole then I will have some hope you
actually believe what your saying!

Ted