On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 08:15:41 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Are there *any* commercial entities out there which actually operate
> sanely?

Yes, but every commercial entity has its pockets of insanity - because 
people are involved.

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 08:17:52 +0100, scott wrote:

>>> More realistically, MS would never take any decision that forced a
>>> significant proportion of its user base to switch away from Windows.
>>
>> Except that with Windows 10, they may well have done that, what with
>> the privacy issues that are starting to surface.
> 
> MS know that it's only a very small proportion of people who will worry
> about that. I'm on several gaming forums and there are plenty of threads
> about upgrading to Win10, privacy issues simply don't come up in the
> discussions, and this is fairly tech savvy people who are upgrading,
> rather than just buying a new PC from a shop. It's all about frame rates
> (which actually seem much better in Win10 for some reason), hardware
> compatibility and how to turn off the automatic updates (particularly
> the automatic restarts).

I think they hope that it's a small proportion.

I have a friend who knows someone at Microsoft involved in this - his 
comment (the friend of a friend) basically was "we disclose pretty much 
exactly what we do in the privacy policy - so I'm not sure what the 
problem is.  How do you provide services like the ones in Cortana 
*without* gathering private information, and how do you disclose that 
without it sounding Orwellian?"  While I'm not a fan of Microsoft, he's 
got a point.  Google and Amazon also do the same thing, but there's no 
significant outcry over what they're doing (though arguably, there is 
some, particularly in Linux communities).

>> The problem is that there's no other platform that's as widely used, so
>> most people will probably just accept those problems.
> 
> Indeed, MS would have to do something *really* wrong to get a
> significant proportion of people to leave Windows.

Yep.  And they have Windows ME to compete with for that.  And Bob.

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>
>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>
>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>
> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>
> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>

Shame that we can't agree.


-- 

Regards
     Gramps

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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:18:42 +0100, Stephen wrote:

> On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>>
>>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>>
>> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>>
>> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>>
>>
> Shame that we can't agree.

Indeed it is, but that's OK, we don't have to agree on everything.  The 
world would be pretty dull if we did. :)

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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On 8/5/2015 6:56 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:18:42 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>
>> On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>>
>>>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>>>
>>>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>>>
>>> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>>>
>>> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>>>
>>>
>> Shame that we can't agree.
>
> Indeed it is, but that's OK, we don't have to agree on everything.  The
> world would be pretty dull if we did. :)
>


Don't worry it will soon be. :-P


-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 19:06:20 +0100, Stephen wrote:

> On 8/5/2015 6:56 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:18:42 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>>>>
>>>>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>>>>
>>>> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>>>>
>>>> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Shame that we can't agree.
>>
>> Indeed it is, but that's OK, we don't have to agree on everything.  The
>> world would be pretty dull if we did. :)
>>
>>
> 
> Don't worry it will soon be. :-P

LOL



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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On 05/08/2015 05:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>
> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>
> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)

Way back when, if you wanted to write computer programs, you practically 
needed a PhD in electrical engineering, propositional logic, Boolean 
algebra and what-not.

Then home computers with BASIC came along, and suddenly any idiot could type

   PRINT 4.5 + 7.9

without having to know or care that the ASCII character codes for "4", 
"." and "5" have to be converted from decimal to binary - and better 
yet, into floating-point representation. And that to perform the 
addition, you have to denormalise one operand so that they both have the 
same exponent, and then add the mantissas, and then renormalise the 
result. (And that addition almost certainly required more than one ADC 
op-code, because the mantissa was definitely wider than 8 bits.) And 
then transform that back to decimal, with some suitable number of places 
of significance based on the actual width of the mantissa. And then 
transform THAT back into ASCII codes. And then compute the correct 
address in the framebuffer to write those code to make the VIC II 
display the text on the screen.

No, you just type the damn thing, and it works.

Suddenly you didn't need to be a super-nerd to write computer programs. 
(And you didn't have to memorise ASCII tables or VIC II register addresses.)

It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how an 
internal combustion engine actually works.

Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation 
details"? Where do you draw the line?

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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:51:12 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
> details"? Where do you draw the line?

Back in the olden days, computing resources suffered from scarcity - you 
had to be concerned about every byte of memory you used, and often 
implementations of data structures included obscure bitfields in order to 
conserve memory.

These days, computing resources *generally* are not considered scarce, 
yet programmers generally behave as though they are, and implement code 
in that way, at the expense of a user interaction model that users can 
actually use.

There *are* cases where high performance needs to be taken into 
consideration - yet the area where user interaction is *really* important 
(games), you get both high performance *and* good user interaction design 
- at least in games that are successful.  Game players have plenty of 
choices for where to spend their time, and if a UI is too complex, 
they'll move onto something that entertains rather than something that 
frustrates them.

That's not "dumbing down," that's using intelligence to design a user 
interaction model that users aren't going to run away screaming from.

It's smart business.

Jim
-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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Am 06.08.2015 um 03:40 schrieb Jim Henderson:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:51:12 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
>> details"? Where do you draw the line?
>
> Back in the olden days, computing resources suffered from scarcity - you
> had to be concerned about every byte of memory you used, and often
> implementations of data structures included obscure bitfields in order to
> conserve memory.
>
> These days, computing resources *generally* are not considered scarce,
> yet programmers generally behave as though they are, and implement code
> in that way, at the expense of a user interaction model that users can
> actually use.

They do? Srsly?

Last time I was in the software development business, conserving 
resources is exactly what programmers absolutely, positively /don't/ 
these days.

Except for, indeed, ...

> There *are* cases where high performance needs to be taken into
> consideration - yet the area where user interaction is *really* important
> (games), you get both high performance *and* good user interaction design
> - at least in games that are successful.  Game players have plenty of
> choices for where to spend their time, and if a UI is too complex,
> they'll move onto something that entertains rather than something that
> frustrates them.

... game developers.

(Them, and embedded systems developers.)

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On 8/5/2015 9:51 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
> It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how an
> internal combustion engine actually works.
>
> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
> details"? Where do you draw the line?

I think that is the crux of the problem.
I don't have an answer.

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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