Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

Salvador Mirzo  <smirzo@example.com> wrote:

I don't have much information.  The command line seemed an awful
experience to them.  I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.

 
This is something I see a lot of... we get interns who are engineering
students or computer science students and they have never seen a command
line of any sort before.  Not bash, not powershell, not anything.  They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
get the concept of the heirarchical filesystem.  "The file is on the
computer!"  "But where on the computer?"  "It's on the computer!"

You can blame the latter on phones and to some extent the latest
MS/Apple GUI's, which go very much out of their way to hide the entire
concept of a heirarchial filesystem from users.  Phones take it to the
next level, your "files" just are, and many phones make it all but
impossible to find out where "are" is located on the actual underlying
filesystem.

The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es.  They've
reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
without ever needing a command line at any point.

We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had
previously thought reputable who had never used a command line and
who just could not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly
book.

Ugh, yeah, that's bad, and one wonders just what their classes were to
make it all the way to PhD and yet know so little.

I think some of these concepts have to be introduced early on, but they
NEED to be introduced early on in order to get any kind of basic computer
literacy.

Yes, letting users GUIize themselves for too long and they can be
almost hopelessly lost.