In a message written on Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 03:42:53PM -0700, David W. Hankins wrote:
Both of these two progression trees represent the cumulative formulation of knowledge: Users are stupid. Automatic is not just best, it's the only way. [snip] The main point, is that if you leave "all other host configuration" details up to, well, the host itself, then in practice what you're really doing is leaving it up to the user. Ultimately, it is mandatory that the end-user make a choice in this model, if not about everything, then about "some things".
This is intolerable in an ISP environment.
I agree 100% with your points, however I believe you have a minor marketing problem that might change how many people receive your comments. It's not that users are stupid, necessarily. They may be of course, but they are also lazy, impatient, and intolerant of things that do not work. As someone who can type "conf t" and use ed to configure their Unix box _I_ won't tolerate manually configuring my home laptop just so I can surf over to weather.com and find out if it's going to rain. While I may do all the testing and work-arounds to make it work for my job, I'll turn it off at home until it just works and is available via my standard provider. It's 2007, not 1987. If I can't take a brand new box out of the packing material, plug it into an ethernet port and have it just work then something is broken. The network, the OS, the protocol, take your pick, but it's broken and not deployable. [Note: How wise it is to put a brand new box on the net is a different question, the point is it should just work.] -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org