There needs to be a differentiation made here between "features" in an OS that are required for it to function properly and can't be removed, and the additional programs provided by an OS maker/developer on the installation medium.
If we were to restrict ourselves to the kind of "features" meeting your first description, then an "OS" wouldn't even come with a basic command-line shell. It wouldn't be much good for anything except trivially simple embedded devices.
Not to slam MS too severely, but one reason their future OS's are becoming to bloated is that they (IMHO) are trying to make all these features function on the majority of modern computers without requiring "add-on" software.
Microsoft are hardly alone in this endeavour. Indeed, you can't even argue they are a particularly bad offender, or were the first to do so.
Microsoft, Apple, Ubuntu, etc are all doing this because *that's what the majority of their customers want*.
Examples: firewall and antivirus programs. While I can chose not to enable those "features" in XP or Vista (so I've read), you can't truly uninstall or delete them.
Disk space is cheap. Anyone quibbling over a few tens (or even hundreds) of megabytes of disk space on modern system is really reaching for something to complain about.
The continued addition of such features in MS OSs leads to this "bloat" and worse, because they're tied directly to the internal workings of OS, it inevitably creates additional security holes waiting to be found and exploited.
They are no more "tied directly to the internal workings of the OS" than they need to be, or than the alternatives from third parties or on other platforms are. Just because Internet Explorer doesn't appear in the Add/Remove software dialog, doesn't mean it's part of the kernel.
Of course I could NOT stick to this line of discourse under that circumstance.
Then you are a hypocrite for holding police to a higher standard than you would hold yourself.
That circumstance has nothing to do with the scenario we are discussing.
Yes, it does. You have no idea if the person running towards you is *actually* going to assault you, so you have to reach a conclusion of the likelihood that they will based on secondary factors and act on that conclusion.
It is ILLEGAL to run towards people swinging baseball bats. If someone does that to you they are already assaulting you!
No, it's not. No, they're not.
You might argue that within a certain proximity an assault can be considered to be happening, but I doubt it.
No one was running TOWARDS the cops. A person was running towards the train. UNARMED. People run towards trains all the time and it is not legal to shoot them.
Your selective interpretation is *every bit* as bad as that of the people who you are attacking.
Your suggestion that "rushing towards the train" was the _only_ action being considered is grossly inaccurate to the point of deception. I can only assume you are trolling, based on this.
All of the officers involved should be fired and banned from ever owning a weapon at the very least, and better yet prosecuted for negligent homicide. The signal being sent is that if you suspect a non-white person has a bomb that is sufficient reason to kill them. This is going to happen more and more frequently in London.
Accidents, no matter how awful, do not justify the same level of disproportional, kneejerk reaction you are suggesting happened in the first place.
Doesn't anyone else think it's a bit odd that an event with such obvious echoes of 911 happens within two days after Lieberman lost the primary because of his stance on the war??? 21 arrests? Planes? On their way to America? It's all a bit too coincidental.
Who is "Lieberman" ? What's a "primary" ?
(I'm assuming both of the above have something to do with American Politics... This post will hopefully elicit an informational response for all those readers who *aren't* Americans...)
That may be a Windows fan's perspective, but any Mac fan will be quick to point out that what makes right-click pop-up menus so "useful" in Windows is that the shortcomings of the OS itself creates a need for them.
I'm not a Windows "fan". I use both, equally, and appreciate them both for what they do well.
Context menus are useful in Windows because they provide quick(er) access via the mouse to commonly used functions.
In OS X, they conceptually do the same thing, but to a *vastly* smaller subset of practical functionality is exposed via them. (Ironically, given your comment) Finding anything on them other than the basic Copy/Cut/Paste options is uncommon and usually the sign of a non-tradtitionally-Mac developer.
Once you involve keyboard shortcut they whole issue becomes irrelevant. The point of context menus is to access functionality via the *mouse*.
Back in the days when Win95 was new, Apple users had a muscle-memory for "Command-c to copy, command-v for paste, command-x for cut, command-a for select all, command-s for save, shift-command-s for save as, command-o for open, command-w for close, command-q for quit, command-f for find, command-b for bold, command-i for italics, etc." because you could count on pretty much every application to work that way, and furthermore the contextual menus which were already at the top of the screen taught them to you as you used the Mac.
In other words, just like Windows users with "muscle memory" for their respective keyboard shortcuts.
The top-line menu on the Mac makes right-click menus best suited to be used for a fast shortcuts to extremely short lists of actions which are common enough that you will use it once in a while, but not so often that you will have the keyboard shortcut memorized within a couple weeks of using the Mac. For example, "view source" in a browser window. (Shift-command-u... or just look in the... surprise! "View" menu.)
Which is *exactly* what they are supposed to be - and are - used for in Windows, and what they are grossly *under*-used for in OS X (this is perhaps because of the "lag" OS X tends to have displaying menus - particularly context menus - making developers reluctant to use them).
Windows has gotten better about HIG over the years, but I still see Windows users right-clicking and searching through a (sometimes very long) menu for something as simple as copying a line of text. Hell, I do it myself when I'm in Windows. I still have a few apps where I can't count on the "normal" keystrokes to work.
That you - and others - do not know how to use the Windows UI properly, does not change the fact that context menus in Windows are a *vastly* more useful UI construct than they are in OS X, because they are used as they are supposed to be, rather than because they meet the bare minimum of UI functionality required to meet OS X's HCI guidelines.
The HCI guidelines for context menus in Windows and OS X are pretty much the same (for obvious reasons). The difference is, in Windows they generally get used as they are supposed to be, whereas in OS X they are generally looked on as the work of the devil and subsequently ignored.
Anyone MIGHT be a terrorist. Anyone MIGHT have a bomb. Almost everyone has strange wires sticking out of their jacket (they are called headphones). You can't shoot everyone. FEAR is not a rational basis for action.
I would *love* to see if you could stick to this line of rational discourse if a man was running at you swinging a baseball bat, or if you'd take the opportunity to either a) move yourself out of (potential) harm's way, or b) attempt to stop him before he could get into a position to hurt you.
(I even know the historical and philosophical reasons while OS X task-switching works as it does.)
Try it. it works like a charm.
No, it doesn't. It requires a much higher conceptual - and, frequently, physical - load than Windows to achive the same goal.
The problem is not in how to use it properly, the problem is the system sucks. It's a (relatively) fiddly and difficult process in OS X to move from an arbitrary window in one application to an arbitrary window in another, via the non-Expose methods. They pretty much all suck because the OS X UI is fundamentally application-, not task-, document- or window-centric. Expose was a (beautifully conceived and executed) kludge around this problem, but even it gets difficult to manage once you get into the dozens of windows (unless you have *huge* amounts of desktop space).
This is a problem I have been complaining to Apple about pretty much forever. MacOS Classic has the same fundamental issue, but it at least has the excuse of a UI that was designed back when multitasking on the desktop - particularly GUI multitasking - was basically unheard of.
(This is, IMHO, why the UI responsiveness of OS X in terms of multitasking is so poor - because the whole thing is basically designed around the assumption that users *won't* be partaking of heavy interactive multitasking, it's not an aspect of the OS that gets a lot of attention.)
Well-said. I can think of a great example. Alt-Tab switching I think first appeared on Windows. So Apple implemented it as Command-Tab switching, BUT they improved it.
Funny you say that, because I find the "Alt-tab" task switching paradigm in OS X to be horribly frustrating and broken, to the point of uselessness, because it switches between *entire applications* and not *windows*. Since the user is generally interacting with different *windows*, this makes it significantly more clumsy and time consuming in OS X to switch between different tasks.
Expose was an excellent kludge around the otherwise broken and/or unusable methods for task-switching in OS X. But it hasn't made them any less broken.
When Microsoft takes from Apple, it's because Apple came up with a great idea. When Apple takes from Microsoft, it's because Microsoft has pushed a new industry standard on the market.
My broad generalisation:
When Apple "steals from Microsoft", they're just reimplementing ideas that either a) already exist in multiple alternative products, or b) are blatantly obvious improvements to existing technology.
When Microsoft "steals from Apple", they're just reimplementing ideas that either a) already exist in multiple alternative products, or b) are blatantly obvious improvements to existing technology.
(And it was added to the Mac with little or no fanfare. To this days, there are a lot of Mac users who never use them at all, while it's the very first thing I try when I want to do just about anything on a Windows box.)
That's because cotext menus in MacOS [X] are basically worthless fluff to fill a tickbox, whereas context menus in Windows are actually useful UI tools.
Note that this is not because of any inherent flaws to MacOS, it's merely because context menus are grossly underused, since The Steve hasn't backflipped and blessed them yet. Now that he's finally conceded multibutton/scroll mice are useful though, it might actually happen.
That's not someone who's being a "bigger" person. That's resignation. That's yet another person who'll refuse to look at alternatives and will stick with Microsoft. Why? I don't know, I really don't... and I find it scary.
Maybe the alternatives don't need his needs (or wants) ?
I disagree, but this argument is completely missing the point.
No, it's not.
If the word "forces" is so dear to you, we can drop it.
It's got nothing to do with the word, it's the (incorrect and irrational) implication behind its use.
The problem remains: Microsoft uses its market position to gain additional sales, from unhappy customers, that would never occur in a perfectly competitive market, and this practice is draining resources from the economy that would otherwise be invested in developing better technology that would benefit consumers.
Microsoft is no more "forcing" anyone to buy Vista to play the latest games than NVidia "forces" them to buy a new video card to play the latest games.
This phenomenon is often summarized as "Microsoft is forcing me to buy XYZ".
No, the phrase "Microsoft is forcing me to buy XYZ" is - as it was in the post I replied to - typically used to describe a completely voluntary and optional transaction wherein one party would rather not pay as much, ideally nothing at all.
Since this description fits pretty much every financial transaction ever made, it's use of the word "force" is, at best, disingenuous.
WGA is only a problem for people who've purchased Windows.
Actually, it's far more of a problem for casual, non-technical pirates than the handful of legitimate customers who have been misidentified.
I personally know of at least half a dozen people who have subsequently either a) purchased a legitimate copy of Windows, b) downgraded back to their older, legitimate version or c) bought a Mac, because they lack the technical knowledge to keep up with the WGA arms race.
WGA is certainly going to reduce the level of Windows piracy. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's going to do so because some people will move away from Windows altogether.
Now if you have a legitimate activation required license of Windows, that is when you have to deal with WGA spying on your every keypress and sending the data off to Redmond with your credit card number.
Yay for ignorant hyperbole ! Also, don't forget to mention that WGA kills puppies...
Simple fact is that WGA is utterly transparent and utterly irrelevant to most legitimate users, and even those it isn't, it isn't an issue for very long.
"Ease of use" vs. "intuitive"..? An interesting distinction.
And an important one:).
"Intuitiveness" is a measure of the "discoverability" of new, similar functionality based on knowledge you already have (eg: discovering how to drag and drop selected text, once you already know how to drag and drop icons). A more verbal description would be "ease of learning".
"Ease of use" is a measure of efficiency - once you know how to use it, how well does it work. This is a mixture of finer measurements like intuitiveness, consistency, etc.
Sit the average person without any computer experience (an oxymoron today, but anyway) down in front of a computer with or without a GUI and they will be more or less equally confused.
Certainly. However, they're far more likely to discover the relationship between the physical mouse and the on-screen mouse pointer and that clicking the mouse buttons can achieve [useful] things, than they are (after discovering what the keyboard does) to discover the right jumble of characters that needs to be typed into a CLI to elicit a [useful] response.
The only computers that are even close to intuitive are the turnkey devices like iPods, or the Mailstation e-mail appliance.
Which are GUI interfaces (well, certainly the iPod is, I'm not familiar with the other device).
However, one thing we do know (from researching the subject) is that if things move around the GUI they become harder to find, whether we're talking text labels, images, or both, because you can no longer use "muscle memory" to locate them. Muscle memory is a very real phenomenon and is the primary reason why repetitive training of any kind is helpful. The brain likes to follow existing patterns that it already follows, which is also why habits are, well, habit-forming.
"Muscle memory" helps with *some* GUI elements (eg: knowing where the context menu is going to appear in relation to the mouse pointer), but I'd have to say it's a bit of a stretch to say it has much influence on things like menu item and toolbar locations. "Muscle memory" refers to the ability to appropriately position the mouse cursor (or similar input device) without any cognitive process being involved. I don't think that's typical when using things like menus and toolbars.
Anyway I haven't had many problems with the muscle training issue on Windows. Where I do see the issue is on the Mac. They went from the very nice, simple, functional Dock on NeXTStep to the stupid, eye-candy, glitz-only Dock on OSX. The primary difference? The new one looks slick, and the old one's elements are always in the same damned place.
While I share your distaste for OS X's Dock, if I'm not mistaken it's providing a lot more functionality than the old NeXT Dock did (which IIRC was basically just a program launcher).
Where does it say that Microsoft has a say in what is set up as default in the OS?
That would be the contractual agreement between OEMs and Microsoft.
Microsoft have every right to insist OEMs ship *Microsoft's product* just the way *Microsoft* wants them to. Likewise, OEMs have every right to refuse and thus lose any incidental benefits agreeing to the contract might have provided like, say, lower prices.
You think the biggest $CAR_MANUFACTURER deal in $MAJOR_CITY is allowed to present the cars in whatever way they want ? Hell, no - they have to have them displayed *exactly* how $CAR_MANUFACTURER says they do, who will dictate which models are given the best positions, which other models (and/or brands) can be in the same general area, etc, etc.
Do they seriously think they can make people only use their searches/office/whatever?
No, nor are they suggesting they should. This is about *contract-bound OEMs selling computers with Windows* not end users. Once you've got the thing, you can do whatever you want with it, within the bounds of copyright law.
While this is probably a fair comment for other reasons, I disagree that consistent location of conceptual UI elements has much, if any, influence on how intuitive an interface is.
Graphical User Interfaces are intuitive because you can remember the location of things.
No, they're intuitive because instead of expecting the user to know exactly what they want to do and how to do it, they give the user a range of options to choose from.
Almost no one runs XP as an unprivileged users by choice, Run As simply doesn't work for too many takes.
Speaking as someone who has been running NT as a regular user for about ten years now, the number of things that don't work with Run As is greatly exaggerated. Heck, I can't even remember the last time I actually needed to log in to any of my Windows machines as an Administrator to do something I couldn't as a regular user via Run As.
[I should probably not post right now, because my ability to write coherently seems to be damped by my sleepiness, but this is Slashdot...]
I doubt it's your sleepiness that is affecting your coherence on this topic.
Something tells me that you misunderstand the nature of "force".
No, something tells me a hell of a lot of people on Slashdot say "force" when they really mean "justify a purchase in a socially acceptable way".
Tell me, if somebody puts a gun to your head and says, "Install Vista", and you do, could you say you were "forced" to do so?
In those circumstances, you probably could. When Microsoft actually does something even remotely close to that, people who say they "force upgrades" might just have the palest glimmerings of a point.
It's about gaining compliance through coersion. In both cases, somebody is doing something that they don't want to do, but are doing anyway because the drawbacks of non-compliance are deemed not worth the benefits.
Funny how Slashdot doesn't wax lyrical about being "forced" to buy new hardware for upcoming games, but for some reason complaining about being "forced" to buy some additional piece of software to play that game garners nothing more than understanding nods.
By your logic, I have been "forced" to buy, well, basically everything I've ever spent money on.
When you voluntarily go out and buy a new piece of software, so that you are able to *play computer games*, in no way is that being "forced".
The whole "Microsoft forces upgrades" meme doesn't even pass the laugh test, to anyone who actually bothers to examine it objectively. About the closest you could possibly get is "Microsoft enables businesses to force upgrades in other businesses" - and even that's a massive stretch.
Most of the cool electronics that geeks here would kill for are castrated and then have soft corners installed for us "special" americans so we do not hurt ourselves.
I think you'll find the attitude is not so much "dumb Americans" as "dumb non-Japanese". It's not like other "caucasian" countries are swimming in the cool eletronic gadgetry that is commonplace in Japan, either.
Slashdot Mirror
If we were to restrict ourselves to the kind of "features" meeting your first description, then an "OS" wouldn't even come with a basic command-line shell. It wouldn't be much good for anything except trivially simple embedded devices.
Not to slam MS too severely, but one reason their future OS's are becoming to bloated is that they (IMHO) are trying to make all these features function on the majority of modern computers without requiring "add-on" software.
Microsoft are hardly alone in this endeavour. Indeed, you can't even argue they are a particularly bad offender, or were the first to do so.
Microsoft, Apple, Ubuntu, etc are all doing this because *that's what the majority of their customers want*.
Examples: firewall and antivirus programs. While I can chose not to enable those "features" in XP or Vista (so I've read), you can't truly uninstall or delete them.
Disk space is cheap. Anyone quibbling over a few tens (or even hundreds) of megabytes of disk space on modern system is really reaching for something to complain about.
The continued addition of such features in MS OSs leads to this "bloat" and worse, because they're tied directly to the internal workings of OS, it inevitably creates additional security holes waiting to be found and exploited.
They are no more "tied directly to the internal workings of the OS" than they need to be, or than the alternatives from third parties or on other platforms are. Just because Internet Explorer doesn't appear in the Add/Remove software dialog, doesn't mean it's part of the kernel.
Relative to its contemporaries, Windows isn't "bloated".
"Bloat" is - and always has been - just a term used by computing elitists (ie: geeks) to describe features they personally have no interest in.
Then you are a hypocrite for holding police to a higher standard than you would hold yourself.
That circumstance has nothing to do with the scenario we are discussing.
Yes, it does. You have no idea if the person running towards you is *actually* going to assault you, so you have to reach a conclusion of the likelihood that they will based on secondary factors and act on that conclusion.
It is ILLEGAL to run towards people swinging baseball bats. If someone does that to you they are already assaulting you!
No, it's not. No, they're not.
You might argue that within a certain proximity an assault can be considered to be happening, but I doubt it.
No one was running TOWARDS the cops. A person was running towards the train. UNARMED. People run towards trains all the time and it is not legal to shoot them.
Your selective interpretation is *every bit* as bad as that of the people who you are attacking.
Your suggestion that "rushing towards the train" was the _only_ action being considered is grossly inaccurate to the point of deception. I can only assume you are trolling, based on this.
All of the officers involved should be fired and banned from ever owning a weapon at the very least, and better yet prosecuted for negligent homicide. The signal being sent is that if you suspect a non-white person has a bomb that is sufficient reason to kill them. This is going to happen more and more frequently in London.
Accidents, no matter how awful, do not justify the same level of disproportional, kneejerk reaction you are suggesting happened in the first place.
Who is "Lieberman" ? What's a "primary" ?
(I'm assuming both of the above have something to do with American Politics... This post will hopefully elicit an informational response for all those readers who *aren't* Americans...)
I'm not a Windows "fan". I use both, equally, and appreciate them both for what they do well.
Context menus are useful in Windows because they provide quick(er) access via the mouse to commonly used functions.
In OS X, they conceptually do the same thing, but to a *vastly* smaller subset of practical functionality is exposed via them. (Ironically, given your comment) Finding anything on them other than the basic Copy/Cut/Paste options is uncommon and usually the sign of a non-tradtitionally-Mac developer.
Once you involve keyboard shortcut they whole issue becomes irrelevant. The point of context menus is to access functionality via the *mouse*.
Back in the days when Win95 was new, Apple users had a muscle-memory for "Command-c to copy, command-v for paste, command-x for cut, command-a for select all, command-s for save, shift-command-s for save as, command-o for open, command-w for close, command-q for quit, command-f for find, command-b for bold, command-i for italics, etc." because you could count on pretty much every application to work that way, and furthermore the contextual menus which were already at the top of the screen taught them to you as you used the Mac.
In other words, just like Windows users with "muscle memory" for their respective keyboard shortcuts.
The top-line menu on the Mac makes right-click menus best suited to be used for a fast shortcuts to extremely short lists of actions which are common enough that you will use it once in a while, but not so often that you will have the keyboard shortcut memorized within a couple weeks of using the Mac. For example, "view source" in a browser window. (Shift-command-u... or just look in the... surprise! "View" menu.)
Which is *exactly* what they are supposed to be - and are - used for in Windows, and what they are grossly *under*-used for in OS X (this is perhaps because of the "lag" OS X tends to have displaying menus - particularly context menus - making developers reluctant to use them).
Windows has gotten better about HIG over the years, but I still see Windows users right-clicking and searching through a (sometimes very long) menu for something as simple as copying a line of text. Hell, I do it myself when I'm in Windows. I still have a few apps where I can't count on the "normal" keystrokes to work.
That you - and others - do not know how to use the Windows UI properly, does not change the fact that context menus in Windows are a *vastly* more useful UI construct than they are in OS X, because they are used as they are supposed to be, rather than because they meet the bare minimum of UI functionality required to meet OS X's HCI guidelines.
The HCI guidelines for context menus in Windows and OS X are pretty much the same (for obvious reasons). The difference is, in Windows they generally get used as they are supposed to be, whereas in OS X they are generally looked on as the work of the devil and subsequently ignored.
I would *love* to see if you could stick to this line of rational discourse if a man was running at you swinging a baseball bat, or if you'd take the opportunity to either a) move yourself out of (potential) harm's way, or b) attempt to stop him before he could get into a position to hurt you.
My guess is that you couldn't.
Yes, I have.
I *know* the keyboard shortcuts.
I *know* the UI rules involved.
(I even know the historical and philosophical reasons while OS X task-switching works as it does.)
Try it. it works like a charm.
No, it doesn't. It requires a much higher conceptual - and, frequently, physical - load than Windows to achive the same goal.
The problem is not in how to use it properly, the problem is the system sucks. It's a (relatively) fiddly and difficult process in OS X to move from an arbitrary window in one application to an arbitrary window in another, via the non-Expose methods. They pretty much all suck because the OS X UI is fundamentally application-, not task-, document- or window-centric. Expose was a (beautifully conceived and executed) kludge around this problem, but even it gets difficult to manage once you get into the dozens of windows (unless you have *huge* amounts of desktop space).
This is a problem I have been complaining to Apple about pretty much forever. MacOS Classic has the same fundamental issue, but it at least has the excuse of a UI that was designed back when multitasking on the desktop - particularly GUI multitasking - was basically unheard of.
(This is, IMHO, why the UI responsiveness of OS X in terms of multitasking is so poor - because the whole thing is basically designed around the assumption that users *won't* be partaking of heavy interactive multitasking, it's not an aspect of the OS that gets a lot of attention.)
Funny you say that, because I find the "Alt-tab" task switching paradigm in OS X to be horribly frustrating and broken, to the point of uselessness, because it switches between *entire applications* and not *windows*. Since the user is generally interacting with different *windows*, this makes it significantly more clumsy and time consuming in OS X to switch between different tasks.
Expose was an excellent kludge around the otherwise broken and/or unusable methods for task-switching in OS X. But it hasn't made them any less broken.
My broad generalisation:
When Apple "steals from Microsoft", they're just reimplementing ideas that either a) already exist in multiple alternative products, or b) are blatantly obvious improvements to existing technology.
When Microsoft "steals from Apple", they're just reimplementing ideas that either a) already exist in multiple alternative products, or b) are blatantly obvious improvements to existing technology.
That's because cotext menus in MacOS [X] are basically worthless fluff to fill a tickbox, whereas context menus in Windows are actually useful UI tools.
Note that this is not because of any inherent flaws to MacOS, it's merely because context menus are grossly underused, since The Steve hasn't backflipped and blessed them yet. Now that he's finally conceded multibutton/scroll mice are useful though, it might actually happen.
Maybe the alternatives don't need his needs (or wants) ?
No, it's not.
If the word "forces" is so dear to you, we can drop it.
It's got nothing to do with the word, it's the (incorrect and irrational) implication behind its use.
The problem remains: Microsoft uses its market position to gain additional sales, from unhappy customers, that would never occur in a perfectly competitive market, and this practice is draining resources from the economy that would otherwise be invested in developing better technology that would benefit consumers.
Microsoft is no more "forcing" anyone to buy Vista to play the latest games than NVidia "forces" them to buy a new video card to play the latest games.
This phenomenon is often summarized as "Microsoft is forcing me to buy XYZ".
No, the phrase "Microsoft is forcing me to buy XYZ" is - as it was in the post I replied to - typically used to describe a completely voluntary and optional transaction wherein one party would rather not pay as much, ideally nothing at all.
Since this description fits pretty much every financial transaction ever made, it's use of the word "force" is, at best, disingenuous.
No, it wasn't. IE is (and always was) a 100% userspace application. Architecturally, it's no different to its equivalents in KDE, GNOME and OS X.
Actually, it's far more of a problem for casual, non-technical pirates than the handful of legitimate customers who have been misidentified.
I personally know of at least half a dozen people who have subsequently either a) purchased a legitimate copy of Windows, b) downgraded back to their older, legitimate version or c) bought a Mac, because they lack the technical knowledge to keep up with the WGA arms race.
WGA is certainly going to reduce the level of Windows piracy. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's going to do so because some people will move away from Windows altogether.
Now if you have a legitimate activation required license of Windows, that is when you have to deal with WGA spying on your every keypress and sending the data off to Redmond with your credit card number.
Yay for ignorant hyperbole ! Also, don't forget to mention that WGA kills puppies...
Simple fact is that WGA is utterly transparent and utterly irrelevant to most legitimate users, and even those it isn't, it isn't an issue for very long.
And an important one :).
"Intuitiveness" is a measure of the "discoverability" of new, similar functionality based on knowledge you already have (eg: discovering how to drag and drop selected text, once you already know how to drag and drop icons). A more verbal description would be "ease of learning".
"Ease of use" is a measure of efficiency - once you know how to use it, how well does it work. This is a mixture of finer measurements like intuitiveness, consistency, etc.
Actually, GUIs aren't intuitive regardless.
They're certainly more intuitive than CLIs.
Sit the average person without any computer experience (an oxymoron today, but anyway) down in front of a computer with or without a GUI and they will be more or less equally confused.
Certainly. However, they're far more likely to discover the relationship between the physical mouse and the on-screen mouse pointer and that clicking the mouse buttons can achieve [useful] things, than they are (after discovering what the keyboard does) to discover the right jumble of characters that needs to be typed into a CLI to elicit a [useful] response.
The only computers that are even close to intuitive are the turnkey devices like iPods, or the Mailstation e-mail appliance.
Which are GUI interfaces (well, certainly the iPod is, I'm not familiar with the other device).
However, one thing we do know (from researching the subject) is that if things move around the GUI they become harder to find, whether we're talking text labels, images, or both, because you can no longer use "muscle memory" to locate them. Muscle memory is a very real phenomenon and is the primary reason why repetitive training of any kind is helpful. The brain likes to follow existing patterns that it already follows, which is also why habits are, well, habit-forming.
"Muscle memory" helps with *some* GUI elements (eg: knowing where the context menu is going to appear in relation to the mouse pointer), but I'd have to say it's a bit of a stretch to say it has much influence on things like menu item and toolbar locations. "Muscle memory" refers to the ability to appropriately position the mouse cursor (or similar input device) without any cognitive process being involved. I don't think that's typical when using things like menus and toolbars.
Anyway I haven't had many problems with the muscle training issue on Windows. Where I do see the issue is on the Mac. They went from the very nice, simple, functional Dock on NeXTStep to the stupid, eye-candy, glitz-only Dock on OSX. The primary difference? The new one looks slick, and the old one's elements are always in the same damned place.
While I share your distaste for OS X's Dock, if I'm not mistaken it's providing a lot more functionality than the old NeXT Dock did (which IIRC was basically just a program launcher).
That would be the contractual agreement between OEMs and Microsoft.
Microsoft have every right to insist OEMs ship *Microsoft's product* just the way *Microsoft* wants them to. Likewise, OEMs have every right to refuse and thus lose any incidental benefits agreeing to the contract might have provided like, say, lower prices.
You think the biggest $CAR_MANUFACTURER deal in $MAJOR_CITY is allowed to present the cars in whatever way they want ? Hell, no - they have to have them displayed *exactly* how $CAR_MANUFACTURER says they do, who will dictate which models are given the best positions, which other models (and/or brands) can be in the same general area, etc, etc.
Do they seriously think they can make people only use their searches/office/whatever?
No, nor are they suggesting they should. This is about *contract-bound OEMs selling computers with Windows* not end users. Once you've got the thing, you can do whatever you want with it, within the bounds of copyright law.
While this is probably a fair comment for other reasons, I disagree that consistent location of conceptual UI elements has much, if any, influence on how intuitive an interface is.
Ease of use, yes. Intuitiveness ? Not IMHO.
Maybe if you're going to ignore anything that happened before 1999, and anything except the low-end marketplace.
No, they're intuitive because instead of expecting the user to know exactly what they want to do and how to do it, they give the user a range of options to choose from.
Speaking as someone who has been running NT as a regular user for about ten years now, the number of things that don't work with Run As is greatly exaggerated. Heck, I can't even remember the last time I actually needed to log in to any of my Windows machines as an Administrator to do something I couldn't as a regular user via Run As.
How features like IE were removed from the Kernel, and turned into ordinary apps.
IE was never in the kernel. The rest of your rant is based on a similar level of ignorance.
I doubt it's your sleepiness that is affecting your coherence on this topic.
Something tells me that you misunderstand the nature of "force".
No, something tells me a hell of a lot of people on Slashdot say "force" when they really mean "justify a purchase in a socially acceptable way".
Tell me, if somebody puts a gun to your head and says, "Install Vista", and you do, could you say you were "forced" to do so?
In those circumstances, you probably could. When Microsoft actually does something even remotely close to that, people who say they "force upgrades" might just have the palest glimmerings of a point.
It's about gaining compliance through coersion. In both cases, somebody is doing something that they don't want to do, but are doing anyway because the drawbacks of non-compliance are deemed not worth the benefits.
Funny how Slashdot doesn't wax lyrical about being "forced" to buy new hardware for upcoming games, but for some reason complaining about being "forced" to buy some additional piece of software to play that game garners nothing more than understanding nods.
By your logic, I have been "forced" to buy, well, basically everything I've ever spent money on.
When you voluntarily go out and buy a new piece of software, so that you are able to *play computer games*, in no way is that being "forced".
The whole "Microsoft forces upgrades" meme doesn't even pass the laugh test, to anyone who actually bothers to examine it objectively. About the closest you could possibly get is "Microsoft enables businesses to force upgrades in other businesses" - and even that's a massive stretch.
I think you'll find the attitude is not so much "dumb Americans" as "dumb non-Japanese". It's not like other "caucasian" countries are swimming in the cool eletronic gadgetry that is commonplace in Japan, either.
Don't you watch movies ? Cars explode as soon as all of their wheels are off the ground.