Op 21-3-2016 om 11:23 schreef Tim Coote:
I was not saying at all that my views are typical, just to get that straight. But I see no end to the complexity that will arise. No end to it. At all. I see no elegance in it either. I mean, if you can keep this as simple as possible, and as elegant as possible, kudos to you. You are working with an inelegant system (IPv6 in its entirety) but you are maintaining sense and sanity in spite of it, or in the face of it. That would be outstanding, you know. Typically though my experience with Linux especially in the later days, (( ( and my experience with the basics of NM as well ) )) is that many systems are flawed even from a basic user experience design perspective. The simple truth is from MY perspective that *most* commercial applications decided for end users are typically rather user friendly. Take your average computer game: if it's not easy to use, people will not enjoy using it, and enjoyment is like the essence of a game. Your average website (that services millions of people) has a better designed interface (in many cases) than your typical desktop client or computer program application, these days. Webdesign in that sense is where the money is. I see rich text editors in websites that are better designed (although more buggy) than any other text editor I know of (on the desktop). That doesn't mean any application on Linux needs to be user-unfriendly. That depends entirely on the developer or designer, you might say. But at the same time many "computer technical" websites like the most important ones (on the ietf.org drafts) are still stuck in the dark ages. You can go on talking about the next evolution, but look at that web page. It is hideous. That is one of the most ugly and in some ways, because of that, non-functional, web pages still in existence for any large or important body. https://tools.ietf.org/wg/homenet/ Even someone doing nothing but change the margins could improve that page a 1000 fold. Now if the same attitude is used to design even command line interfaces to programs (and I guess you can bet it is) you get command line interfaces to programs that are hideous as well. Any lack of an interest in providing good interfaces or designing something beautiful will always lead to the designing of interfaces that are hideous. And they will be hard to use, you will forget how to use it, you use a manual to remember the commands, etc. etc. etc. You can see with IPv6 that there has been no interest to make this thing easy to understand. Concerns constantly appear to have come up that were not even ANTICIPATED. That means that the system is not elegant and a certain form of patch work is constantly needed to make it function well again or to fill up the holes. The system is not elegant. Period. (( ( I consider NM itself (nmcli) hard to use and there was a bug where my wifi device regularly stopped working for no reason and it was said to be rather well known. Until I integrated some setup scripts into NM and migrated my openvpn configuration into it, I didn't even want to use it. I only needed it for the roaming features. After that it was still less elegant than using openvpn directly. Eventually connecting the VPN was easier than ever before because of the KDE icon for it and the feedback I got from it. The lock icon on the wifi connection - that made a great deal of difference for me. Feedback. I also made pains to upgrade NM to a later version (this was on OpenSUSE 13.2) because of the advances I needed, such as using cipher: none, as an option. I enjoy seeing the advances in the version number as a matter of speaking because I think they are doing good work) )). If you can create an interface to the whole system that is very elegant, I'm all for it, you know. I am speaking out of my own interests as well, but I do not consider it selfish. Limiting the scope of what users need to do and thinking of a setup that is logical, sensible, and some good default, not needing any other choices because it is just a best practice kind of thing, even in the context of having a lot of freedom to do it any way you want --- a reasonable default setup that users do not need to worry about. I mean, that's how you can bring some calm into the thing I guess. My personal interest is not getting headaches in doing the things I need to do. My personal interest is in having the power to shape my personal life. If everything is beyond me to know anything about, I lose a lot of power. I am fighting to maintain sanity and dignity in the face of it all. I am fighting for this thing (everything I suppose) to be kept understandable. I do not like the idea that you have to be an engineer with 3 decades of experience to be able to turn on a light knob. I want things to be easy, not just easy to use in a sense (given the default mode) but also easy to adjust in case you do not like the default mode. Apple software is easy. However the moment you want to do anything else, you're screwed. If you want to export music out of iTunes, or maintain it in a format you want, you are screwed. You can't. They decided that for you. "Why do you need that?" they will say. If the end result is some auto-configured network where all devices can operate on a huge scale finding each other like bots, and doing all sort of nifty stuff, then the power is to the computers and not to the humans. Soon every computer will be a freaking agent navigating networks and collecting resources, and all you can do as a user is to watch it and turn your mind to something else because it is boring, you can't do anything about it anymore, it has a life of its own, you better go jerk off or do drugs. Maybe waste your life away on instagram. Contemplate the meaninglessness of it all. It reminds me of the Culture books of Iain M. Banks. The culture there described is a huge society in which nobody really needs to work. Material production is of such a high standard that everyone basically has everything they need and they just made everything free although in order to have success you'd still have to find an occupation, but more for the sake of not losing your mind in idleness than anything else. Computers are seen as real beings and everyone is bored. That's the gist of the culture: boredom. That's probably not what the author intended to convey, but it is what he is conveying. Practically everyone in all those books that come from the Culture is bored, but in the latest book I am reading the protagonist is actually described as bored beyond measure, looking for something to do, and the Culture's "secret service" (Contact) (or rather perhaps, its ultra secret department, Special Circumstance) contacts him with a potential job. It goes so far as that in combat, computer AI takes over completely, because human reflexes are not fast enough to account for all the changes in battle. They have suits and guns that will completely take over in the case of an emergency. In general, in a battle between space ships, the battles are being fought by the ships' Minds. Humans make some decisions, but the most important ones are made by Minds, that also designed their language (I just read). And the general composure of these people is that they are idle and bored. They wonder about the meaning of their lives. They are lonely. As a computer network engineer, and application engineer, and software developer, and possible .... 'world changer', I see these changes as taking away my authority and power in designing the systems I want. If your only care in the world is making money selling IoT systems or homes, or ensuring that you can manage the boxes you need to manage for your work, or to operate some cloud so that you can sell those services, or whatever. And all your interest is about is doing THAT work proficiently and going with the flow of it and not much questioning what is going on as long as you can keep making a living. Without really any thought of what it's for or why it's needed. Then it doesn't matter much what systems you have as long as it can make you money. If you just want to be able to use your instagram and your whatever, if you want to use your Facebook and have your email or meet your people, and you work for designing those systems, and perhaps -- you try to solve societies problems my making people less important and having computers take over, and you work to design the stuff that government uses or wants. With the interest of... what I don't know. Internet of Things. 200+ devices in a home. It has no benefit to me, other than that it would be nice to control the lights and the heat more easily since it is rather hard for me to walk. The homes you are talking about are probably huge. People who need climate control for many rooms, that sort of thing, right. In that Culture book, a central computer (mind) just does all of that. "He took dinner on the terrace, the terminal screen open and showing the pages of an ancient barbarian treatise on games. The book - a millennium old when the civilisation had been Contacted, two thousand years earlier - was limited in its appreciation, of course, but Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated at the way a society's games revealved much about its ethos, its philosphy, its very soul. Besides, barbarian societies had always intrigued him, even before their games had. The book was interesting. He rested his eyes watching the sun going down, then went back to it as the darkness deepened. (...). He told the house to refuse all incoming calls. The terrace lights gradually brightened. Chiark's farside shown whitely overhead, coating everything in silver; stars twinkled in a cloudless sky. Gurgeh read on. The terminal beeped. He looked severely at the camera eye set in one corner of the screen. 'House,' he said, 'are you going deaf?'" Someone (a drone) from Contact overrides the house's orders, and sends a message. The drone arrives, is rather offensive, and leaves. The drone takes off into the sky. "He took out the pocket terminal. 'House,' he said. 'Raise that drone.' He continued to stare into the sky. 'Which drone,' the house said. 'Chamlis?' He stared at the terminal. 'No! That little scumbag from Contact; Loash Armasco-Iap Wu-Handrahen Xato Koum, that's who! The one that was just here!' 'Just here?' the house said, in its Puzzled voice. Gurgeh sagged. He sat down. 'You didn't see or hear anything just now?' 'Nothing but silence for the last eleven minutes, Gurgeh, since you told me to hold all calls. there have been two of those since, but ---' 'Never mind,' Gurgeh sighed. 'Get me Hub.'" ;-). Bart. |