Re: Ridin' Through Gateway Country, Roundin' up details.... (fwd)

[damaged justice <frogfarm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting Robert G. Brown (bob@acm.org):
> 
> >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. Perhaps the public wants something
> we think of as "Bloated", because it allows them a comfort level. Let's
> face it, reading about taxes is like watching paint dry on a cool, damp
> day (at least for most people). If the folks at Intuit have discovered
> that users retain more by having them watch a five minute video clip about
> home mortgage deduction rules (and pay less taxes, and save some money, and 
> not get hassled by the IRS doing it), is that "Bloatware"?

Don't forget that dancing paperclip. How would Office users survive without
it? After all, the public must have demanded it...

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. My biggest
gripe with the whole hormone-treated milk thing wasn't that they were doing
it -- it was that they were talking about not producing any more milk from
hormone-challenged cows. Had there been no public outcry, they might very
well have gotten away with it. And our choices would have been diminished,
thanks to the ignorance and/or apathy of others.

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?"

or,

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you with installing systems?"

and tailor its operation to the user's response. Give novices the hand-
holding they need/want, and give power users control over everything down
to the last file.

Instead, we get Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum -- "Simple" and "Advanced"
installations that are fundamentally no different from each other.

[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. Secretaries are my favorite example. They've suffered for years with
the most unfriendly software imaginable, and somehow they survived. 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.

(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. You can try to explain the difference
between markup and presentation until you're blue in the face, and they
Just Don't Get It. And probably never will.)

[re cable modems, etc]

I keep hearing rumors that ADSL will be here sometime this summer...

> 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.

I think of Bill Gates more as P.T. Barnum than Hitler, or even Rockefeller.
He puts on a good dog and pony show, and most of the people who go know
perfectly well they're being bamboozled; they're either there to sneer
derisively and mock the naked emperor, or they're just there to have fun
and watch the show. Of course, entertainment only goes so far. 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. Hell, the second you get on the net you're
bombarded with people who call you a moron for using anything Microsoft --
who wouldn't switch under those circumstances, except a devout masochist?

--
Explain to me, slowly and carefully, why if person A, when screwed over on a
deal by B, is morally obligated to consult, pay, and defer to, person C for
the purpose of seeing justice done, and why person C has any legitimate gripe
if A just hauls off and smacks B around like a dead carp. (Michael Schneider)