[2065] in testers
[gjackson@mit.edu: About "decmips 7.4E: login "]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Wed Jun 10 11:40:32 1992
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 92 11:39:58 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: testers@Athena.MIT.EDU
I agree with Greg. He said I could forward this to the testers list.
jik
----- Forwarded message
To: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
From: Gregory A. Jackson <gjackson@mit.edu>
Subject: About "decmips 7.4E: login "
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 10 Jun 92 10:15:55 -0400.
<9206101415.AA24433@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 92 10:26:18 EDT
Sender: gjackson@Athena.MIT.EDU
It needs to be spelled out explicitly, in my view, any place that a
reasonable user might otherwise be misled and confused. Otherwise we
will simply generate lots of extra work for problem resolvers, rather
than solve the problem in a high-quality way up front.
I intentionally rely wholly on public-workstation defaults and on
published instructions. If doing something requires special knowledge,
then it shouldn't be published generally. That means, I guess, that a
second alternative is to remove all references to the default-name
business from "general" documents.
Or, to put it more concretely: when Professor Penman, who has a
workstation on his desk that he thinks of as "private" much as I think
of mine that way, reads the handout and tries to follow it, he'll get
a cryptic error message and decide that Athena is back to its old
reward-the-experts, punish-the-users ways. That's not the right
result.
gj
E40-359/MIT/Cambridge MA 02139
voice: (617) 253-3712
fax: (617) 258-8736
----- End of forwarded message
