Kclug Digest, Vol 39, Issue 9

[Monty J. Harder]

On 10/8/07, cragos at gmail.com <cragos at gmail.com> wrote:
These two are related in the *NIX mentality that incubated the development
of the BSDs and Linux:

8: Tendencies towards standards compliance and openness in the FOSS
> community make it far more likely that related projects will be able
> to effectively and efficiently interact.


10: (More a plus for *NIX than FOSS) Having more mature command line
> interfaces than are available in pre-Win2k7 builds of Windows Server
> substantially cut the amount of time needed to populate changes across
> multiple servers.


The Windows people have completely adopted the "GUI=User Friendly,
CLI=Unfriendly" meme to the point where they don't recognize the power of
the CLI and text files, which are at the heart of the Tao of Unix.  I
routinely compose "recipes" of Bourne shell commands that expedite
configuring a *nix server in a certain way, and share them with my
co-workers.  With those recipes, they can quickly apply a fix to establish a
consistent state on the target machine.  Explaining how to do the same thing
in a GUI can take several pages.

Given a system that can be configured entirely with text files and command
lines, we can build "friendly" GUIs for the newbs, but it's not always so
easy to go the other direction.

Just for an example, whenever I boot my laptop into Windows, the sound
settings are not what I left them at when Windows last shut down.  Every
freaking time I have to open up the Control Panel Sounds and Audio applet,
click on Advanced in the Device volume section, and re-adjust the sliders to
what I want.  This is going backwards.  My very first sound card when I ran
DOS had a command I could include in  AUTOEXEC.BAT to set the card up the
way I wanted, and I could also put commands in the batch files that launched
various apps to reconfigure the thing to my preferences for that app.

The entire point of a computer is to automate repetitive tasks.  "Point and
grunt" is hardly as sophisticated as actual words.
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