26 Oct
2006
26 Oct
'06
12:45 a.m.
On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 22:31 -0400, Rob wrote:
On Wednesday 25 October 2006 20:35, Paul Davis wrote:
lpr is remarkably forgiving of most of the things we throw at it. maybe
the kids should try printing mp3 files ;)
my family is well trained
<snip>
from the command line, its so easy,
from a GUI, it seems more work than it should be.
Sure, if you dictate the use of only certain file formats, and
ensure that your handful of users are "well trained", you can
claim that anything's easier than the alternative. But then you
haven't made the computer easier, just trained people to use
something that they would previously have considered hard.
"Export to PDF" once, lpr-print many, versus "fire up ooffice every time
you want to print" ... not sure which of those is harder.
Computers don't usually come with free training,
much less
training that includes concepts like ".doc is an unstable,
in-progress format".
the training for this actually is free. its duration varies depending on
how many documents you try to exchange and with how many other users who
believe that handle "word documents".
for our kids, it didn't too many shared homework assignments in which
they found that their lab partners couldn't share .doc files written on
different windows or mac machines (even ignoring linux) before this
lesson was easily learnt, with very little input from me.
Nonetheless, I'm still optimistic that the day
when users have
the option to be productive under Linux without a command line
is not that far off.
me too.