Oh, c'mon. This is the geek version of the elite's Veblenesque taste for handmade artifacts. Computers should be easy to use, and if the graphics are attractive, so much the better. Hideous, obscure Unix command lines may make put a spring in your phalli, but give me pull-down menus and catchy icons anyday.
Doug
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Once I got home, I decided I should go back to this thread. (Caution, techno-babble alert)
Even though I have a thang for the unix cli because of it's utter simplicity, raw power, and yes it pins Kelley's dick-o-meter, I thought you should at least see some of the lesser bells and whistles, those fake buttons and drop down menus in X-windows. Go here:
http://www.rawbw.com/~cgrimes/homepage/desk_1.jpeg
This is what my desktop (twm) looks like. There are plenty of all those buttons, menus and catchy icons---but this is the extremely spartan version by most X-window standards. Search under X-windows or Linux for the fancy looking desktops.
Anyway I composed this arrangement a little to show some of the things available. There is /dave/'s picture of bin Laden, Reagan, and Gorby from XView, which also did the screen capture. Netscape of course, with your post in the archives. The yellow block indicates cut/paste clipboard text. The gray window just in front is Xemacs with the text pasted into it---which will become this post. Behind to the right is the viewer for the layout program TeX. It shows last New Year's eve's post done as a typeset page---which is theoretically ready for a commercial print shop as a postscript file.
The darker gray box with horizontal bans in the upper left corner is the icon manager for twm. You click one of the bars and the application is iconized or put in the foreground depending on its current state. The little lighter gray box next to it with icons are some of the graphics programs---you click the icon and the application is launched. Below and in front is the file folder or current directory. You click on the file and if it is executable in an application it is launched or opened. If you just want information on the file or just view the file as text you use different mouse buttons. Down in the lower left is a white background window. This is what the command line interface looks like in a window. If you read the commands you will see that this is the ftp session upload to my ISP for the desk_1.jpeg into my homepage directory. I kept the resolution in the jpeg file high so the text could be read in a browser window. And of course all this is free, including the actual box it is all loaded on (a screaming 133Mhz PC about six years old).
The same box was a network server when I had a home network. The only difference between my ISP server and this box is of course the hardware and bandwidth since they use the same OS and applications. So, I masquerade this box as if it was my ISP server for e-mail, network, and internet address purposes. When I am logged into rawbw.com on the shell account, it works the same as my home system, and if I had a DSL connection it would be utterly transparent.
If I could get my ISP to relax their nfs_mount (new file system) protocols, I could literally drag and drop or cut and paste between my system and my ISP account. This would be very handy for building and maintaining websites, since you could mount the website directory tree from the ISP account on your home system, work on it and then umount it back. Of course they don't allow that on user accounts. They make you upload/download via ftp.
Chuck Grimes
