Re: ati (and other issues)

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

>>>Ah! I see your point. Bloat ware.
>>So who are WE to judge whether or not something is "Bloat ware" or not? 
>>We like to think we know what it takes to get a particular point across, 
>>but we have a minimalist sense of that.....
>Don't forget that dancing paperclip. How would Office users survive without 
>it? After all, the public must have demanded it...
Please note that I didn't say that "Bloatware" doesn't exist, or that Adam 
was just wrong.  Bloatware DOES exist, but my Bloatware is your survival 
tool. It's real hard to be judgmental.

My Mother, who can type 145 words per minute (and has for the last 50 years) 
just LOVES the little paper clip and all of his (her? anyone know how to 
check? :) friends, mostly because they persistently remove the mystery of
a complex environment for her.  Please note that she really liked WordPerfect 
5.x, running in DOS, from 1988-1997.

Her focus is on getting the work done, while feeling comfortable with this 
technology. Her benchmark is a 1939 Remington typewriter, complete with 
carbon paper.

The question: Is she running Bloatware?  Please answer this, and in the meantime
I'll ask my Mom.

I think of the paperclip as Bloatware, personally. I wasn't happy until I could 
kill off that paperclip, and all the other little critters. It's possible, just 
well-hidden.

>I see a parallel with organically grown foods. There is a demand for them, 
>but it's not enough for most companies to make money on.
>There is no law prohibiting organic foods -- but they are still more 
>difficult to buy than the alternative, simply because there is less demand 
>for them.
There are (at least) two reasons why organics are more expensive:

      1) They are more labor and resource intensive than more conventional
         methods; yields per unit of resource are not as high.

      2) Organic farming has not achieved the economy of scale required to
         drive prices down to the levels seen with more intensive, volume 
         oriented farming methods.

It's a wee bit glib to say there's just less demand for them. The conditions 
are a little deeper than that.

Let's compare organic farming to premium computing services. Two examples:

      1. I need some software that will do (really exotic application; fill
         one in here if you can).

      2. I want to get a preconfigured computer that has the following...
         (very strange configuration that brings puzzled faces and stammers
          to the people who live in Gateway Country)

For both, you're going to pay a price, maybe a very high price. Neither of  
these things has any economy of scale (Gateway has PLENTY), and it's not at 
all clear that these things lend themselves well to being scaled up.

It would be very interesting to see how a Gateway, Dell, or Compaq would 
ship a computer with Linux. How would you specify what you wanted installed? 
What increment would they charge for amortizing all the configuration and 
packaging work needed?  Would it result in something people would buy?
Be careful what you wish for.

>My biggest gripe with the whole hormone-treated milk thing ...
Sorry, maybe (probably) I'm uninformed, but I don't understand this issue.

>I've said for years that the ideal installation program will, as its very 
>first question, ask something like: "Do you know what you are doing?"
...
>Instead, we get Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum -- "Simple" and "Advanced" 
>installations that are fundamentally no different from each other.
This may be true with Win95, but in NT, there's a good deal of difference 
between "simple" and "advanced", especially for the SDK's (surprise! :), 
but also for Orifice 97, and networking the OS.

[Bob points out that WYSIWYG word processors have sold more because users 
don't have to visualize what their work will look like when printed, easier 
to use, etc, despite the added complexity/bloat]

>True enough. But the average person can be smarter than we give them 
>credit for.
Oh, I give 'em a lot of credit.

>Secretaries are my favorite example. They've suffered for years with the 
>most unfriendly software imaginable, and somehow they survived. 
They survived because they (and their bosses) knew they had no other 
choice. The alternative was to go back to that 1939 Remington I mentioned 
earlier. Unfriendly or otherwise, software at that level was the only thing 
one could get. It wasn't like they were choosing between PFS::Write and
MS Word 6.0 back in 1983.

>I know lots of them (including my mother, at one point) who used 
>troff/ghostscript and other "real" tools. Not all of them saw Word and its 
>ilk as improving on the status quo.
Sure, some people got used to the tools, and visualized stuff through
their own grasp of the tools they've gotten used to, sometimes over months and 
years. They take pride, not only in their work, but also in their skills with 
the tools. It's leads to this point of view.

I knew secretaries who wrote APL and FORTRAN code...at night, they went to 
the Disco, since it was fashionable then. So were polyester leisure suits 
and nuclear power plants.

Here's a somewhat more objective (and less anecdotal) test. Take someone who 
doesn't know anything about computers.  Sit that person down for 15 minutes 
in front of a GUI/WYSIWYG word processor (I won't say which one, but I'm will- 
ing to throw out anything really specialized or with obscure interfaces), and 
just let 'em play around. Then do the same with a character-based package 
with lots of commands available through escape sequences. Which one will they 
prefer?  If you do this 100 times, I'll start to believe that answer.

I believe that the WYSIWYG software will result in more satisfied customers 
(actually I was thinking of Word 97, or the Applixware Word Processor, but 
not FrameMaker, which IMO is the best, but probably too obscure for most) 
than the character based (early Word, WordStar, WP 4.2 -- 5.1) software. 
Oh, you'll get some votes the other way, and some people really frustrated 
with both, but I think you'll get more people to connect with the idea that 
what's on the screen (at least strongly) resembles what's going to come 
out of the printer real soon, and that a lot of the functionality is sort 
of on the dashboard.

>(The WYSIWYG model was a Very Bad Thing in at least one other respect: It 
>convinced all the masses who stumbled onto the World Wide Web that HTML 
>was just another page layout tool. 
Jesus told us "The poor will always be with us." This is no less true in 
the 20th century than it was in the 0th. We're in a more complex world, so 
we can make more mistakes! I've found that people WILL listen, if they're 
in a position to do so, and if they understand it's critical. Otherwise, 
why bother? I can understand that to an Eskimo, Postscript and HTML serve 
about the same purpose. That's fine with me, but then my language doesn't 
have dozens of words for "snow".

>I keep hearing rumors that ADSL will be here sometime this summer... 
>From where? 

*** General Appeal: Can we please stop this practice of saying things
    like "I heard that", and "I keep hearing" on this mailing list? 
    I really want to see the sources of these statements, otherwise 
    none of us have ANY IDEA about how creditable they are.  You can 
    hear almost anything from anyone these days, but it doesn't help 
    to repeat these things if you can't provide a source.

    I'll try to do the same, I'm guilty of it, too. This is not directed 
    at anyone in particular, but a number of people have done this and it 
    makes it harder to challenge these things, or even discuss them in an 
    intelligent way.

>>I like the notion that MS OS'es are "pervasive", rather than popular. 
>>Here's something else that's pervasive, but no one would call "popular": 
>>Malaria.
To confuse the two terms (popular and pervasive) is the worst kind of 
propaganda. It causes what exists to drift into all that we will accept. 
This is exactly what those in a dominant position want.

>I think of Bill Gates more as P.T. Barnum than Hitler, or even Rockefeller. 
IMO any parallel between Gates and Hitler is COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE, and 
in poor taste, to say the very least. No one [here] has made such a comparison, 
and anyone who does is exhibiting insensitivity and ignorance of history on
an appalling scale.

Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Astor.. these (and others) were collectively 
known as "Robber Barons".  The practices of these men and others like 'em were 
what got the Anti-Trust laws on the books in the first place, and IMO it's
not at all inappropriate to list Gates among them. I do not do so as an exercise
in name-calling (unless you want to refer to calling a spade a spade as "name- 
calling").

>He puts on a good dog and pony show, and most of the people who go know 
>perfectly well they're being bamboozled....
I don't like the parallel between Gates and Barnum; you're not portraying intent
quite right.  Everyone knew Barnum was a showman, a tout, and a promoter, a 
jester if you will. When I go to the Circus, or a wax museum, or a sideshow,
I expect to see "Thrills and Chills", the bearded lady, perhaps oddities like 
Tom Thumb and the elephant man. Is what I'm seeing real? Doesn't matter, I 
EXPECT to be deceived, it's all part of the fun! The famous story about Barnums'
Museum... he put a sign near the exit "To the Egress - 25 cents". People paid...
and found themselves on the street! If any other business did that, he'd be up 
on (fraud) charges in a real jiffy, but a SHOWMAN has a kind of social license 
to get away with that sort of thing.

Gates is peddling serious software; information processing is a large segment 
of our economy, and growing fast. I believe that Bill is completely serious 
about what he's saying (however ludicrous it may be in reference to Real Life), 
and he has a record of doing exactly what he says.

He does not have the kind of license we would grant to a Barnum.

>MS has had a horrible reputation with competent computer people for years, and 
>that perception is "trickling down" to the public, even as the public becomes 
>more aware of alternatives.
This has been true of EVERY leader in the computer industry; IBM was frequently 
the target of a lot of hostility as well. Since being pushed off center stage, 
not as many people point to them and say nasty things. Microsoft now gets that 
honor, oftimes deservedly, sometimes not. 

>Hell, the second you get on the net you're bombarded with people who call you a
>moron for using anything Microsoft
When you get on the net you're bombarded with lots of things. If you can somehow
filter out the bigots and the ignorant, you're going to be 'way ahead of the 
game. If someone wants to call you a moron for something you use, sounds like 
their problem, not yours.

>who wouldn't switch under those circumstances, except a devout masochist? 
Someone who doesn't allow the conventional wisdom or a few names called to 
interfere with every choice being made in one's life? (was this a trick 
question? :)
                                                               Regards,
                                                               ---> RGB <---

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