[thelist] PWS - Take II

Burhan Khalid burhankh at hotmail.com
Sun Feb 24 23:50:01 CST 2002


Wow...lots of passionate people out there. Here are a few comments :

What I meant by "overkill" was not in the performance type. I meant in the
installing and configuring area. Let me ask you this, for a beginner user,
which is easier? Working with something that is already installed as part of
MS Office, or going to apache.org, finding the correct binary distro,
downloading it, and then messing with httpd.conf?
Granted there are auto installers out there, but you have to know what the
autoinstaller is doing in order to get most out of it. What if it sets up a
wrong variable (don't tell me THAT has never happened)? What then? Would you
have enough knowledge of Apache to go and fix it yourself? I think not...the
newbie would then be off to apache.org, or getting on a newsgroup, trying to
figure out why his/her purty web page won't show.

...

Most people would rather not go through all that. Granted that I, and I'm
assuming most web developers are familiar enough with the web to download
and install their own webserver of choice, but for someone who is starting
out on the web, Apache can seem ... err ... "difficult".

...

As far as the WYSIWYG FrontPage thing goes...point is valid that most users
would rather point-click and save, and not bother to learn anything. That
goes toward the type of student they are. There will always be those who
just take the class because it is required, and will take the easy way out
to pass it. I am the only tutor for computer science at my college, and
there have been numerous times when students from higher level (4000+)
classes have come to me trying to figure out why their C++ program won't
work, when it is clearly a Computer Science I (beginner's) error. I am
tempted to ask...where were you in CSI?

...

I'd rather use the computer as a learning device/tool. That is, know what is
it doing and why it needs to do it; rather than clicking a button, saving a
file, and posting it on the web, hoping it will show up right. Wouldn't it
be nice if everyone learned to avoid the Word save as HTML feature? There
have been numerous posts on this list from people trying to figure out what
is the best way to extract any reasonable sense from the garbage that Word
autogen puts out.

....

End of Rant.

<disclaimer>
Its midnight on Sunday, CST, and I probably don't make a lot of sense.
Hopefully, I will redeem myself come Monday
</disclaimer>

Burhan Khalid





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