On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:54:10 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 10/8/2011 14:21, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:42:26 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/8/2011 5:40, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>> It's hard to understand why people have trouble affording a single
>>>> hard drive when you buy in such bulk quantities.
>>>
>>> And remember that you're not really their big customer. When 85% of
>>> your sales go to the OEMs, worrying about whether this one guy can
>>> afford to upgrade his disk doesn't really make sense. Especially since
>>> if you can't afford a $50 disk, you can't afford a $200 OS. :-)
>>
>> That's certainly true.  But chances are if you bought the machine,
>> Windows was included.
> 
> That's kind of my point exactly. :-)

Then we agree there.

>> is kinda disingenuous.
> 
> I don't know "disingenuous" is the word I'd use, but sure. There are
> benefits to having one entity saying "here, it's solved, do it this
> way." There are problems with that too, when you want to do it a
> different way.

Thing is, if the best program to accomplish a task on Windows didn't 
follow the Windows UI standards, you'd have the same issue with regards 
to usability.

>>>> upgraded to each incremental pre-release alpha, beta, and release
>>>> candidate on several of their internal servers.
>>>
>>> I can imagine that would screw stuff up. Most people don't design
>>> upgrades to deal with every intermediate release of the software.
>>
>> The guys at Microsoft I talked to (this was back in 2002/2003) said it
>> was a complete nightmare.
> 
> Sure. But "the guy who installs every pre-release version over top of
> the previous pre-release version" isn't the target audience. It's much
> more efficient to design an upgrade to replace the previous production
> system than to design an upgrade to replace every previous version of
> every unreleased upgrade.

Yes, agreed.  I was pointing out a worst case scenario for upgrading 
Windows, nothing more.

>> It is perhaps more common in Linux than it should be, though.
> 
> I'm saying it's because it hurts Linux less. You don't actually lose
> sales due to having your software pull in too many prerequisites. As
> opposed to (for example) having to distribute on a DVD rather than a CD
> if you are close to the edge. (Of course, much more worrisome with
> downloads or with floppies or other low-capacity media.)

Sure.  But there are ways of dealing with that, too.  Most computers have 
USB ports these days, so a USB flash drive can be used (in fact, I did my 
upgrade from oS 11.4 to 12.1 beta 1 using a flash drive.)

Jim

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