Pressing a button in linux is too complicated

[jeffslists]

I had to laugh when I started to read the thread "unmounting a volume"  
This complicated button reminds me of a very short story, "King's 
Advisors and the Toaster" 
(http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/6271/compu034.html)  In this 
story an engineer and a computer scientist are asked to design a 
toaster.  Here is an excerpt:

-----------------------------------------
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of 
his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two 
slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. 
The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The 
engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a 
simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position 
to one of 6 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The 
program would use that darkness level as an index to a 16-element table 
of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and 
start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the 
end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. 
Come back next week and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the 
danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just 
turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What 
you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of 
your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more 
capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook 
sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes 
toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will 
have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

(snipped)

"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the 
design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform 
for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 32MB of memory, a 
500MB hard disk and 17inch SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you 
select a multi-tasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple 
inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. 
(Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a 
hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a 4-bit microcontroller!)."

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded and they all lived 
happily ever after.
-----------------------------------------

In windows or any other sane desktop operating system if I want to open 
my cd-rom drive I press a button and it always opens, unless I'm burning 
a cd, and even then getting the drive to open is no problem.  But with 
all linux distros, AFAIK, pressing a button can be very complicated.  In 
order to get my cd I have to search through processes using 'ps' and try 
to determine what process is locking my drive.  What a total waste of 
time.  Even though I have a B.S. in computer science I don't care to 
waste my time searching through processes in order to retrieve my cd. I 
have been using linux mostly as a server for over six years.

It seems that no one on this list offered a good solution to unmounting 
the volume.  I read solutions that would work in theory, but I didn't 
see anyone give an easy and fast solution that would always work.

A while back I read that retrieving your cd can be really complicated 
because Linus wants the computer to be treated as a server and volumes 
must be unmounted safely.  I read about someone arguing with him about 
this problem.  I'm fuzzy one the details and I don't know where to find 
that information again so I guess you'll just have to look for your self 
to verify this.  Linus is not perfect, but he is still one of my 
favorite software developers.  It's too bad he has to make pressing a 
button so complicated.

I didn't write this to complain I'm just making fun of linux distros.  
Next time you can't get your cd out you should read the story about the 
King and the toaster and laugh like me. :)

-- 
"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical.  It is the power of all true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.  To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness...

	Albert Einstein (1879-1955)