Daemon's Advocate article

[Dan Melomedman]

James Frazer wrote:

> I don't think it matters whether it's a techie server os or not. 

It does, because that's what it is.

> unnecessary hoops -- not because I can't -- but because I don't have the 
> time/patience.

. ..

> I recall reading a comment by Jef Raskin about UI design -- he made a 
> good point by saying that software that attempts to achieve a simple 
> task should be simple to use.  Complicated tasks will always have some 

I couldn't agree more.

> As far as Unix goes many problems are caused by to much choice.  The 

I think many problems are caused by people who abuse the choice. Unix
was initially designed to be simple and flexible, but some (most?) people
don't value simplicity and abuse its flexibility. Case in point: PAM.
Another case in point: the shells. How could PAM become so popular?
Are people really that blind to see that design sucks, the complexity
sucks, and the implementation is hard to get right? Not to mention every
distro/Unix integrator has their own implementation.

> One of the things that always bothered me about the FreeBSD installer 

FreeBSD installer needs to be redesigned from scratch. Everybody knows
this.

> of its user-un-friendly problems are not technical problems, but purely 
> neglected design problems.  If the computer scientists spent as much 

Can't agree more. Too many things are just too inappropriate/needlessly
complex.  Once something stupid becomes part of the OS, it's very hard
to change it later. Actually forget everything I wrote, afterall worse
is better!