> Are the copy-
protected CDs shipping with software on them? If so, can I really trust their software? What if I want to
use my own media player, such as winamp?
1) Yes.
2) No. From the legal page -- "The Player includes technology of EverAd Inc., Midbar Tech Ltd., and QDesign Corp.;"
EverAd is a known spyware product.
3) You can't - at least not without reverse-engineering the player, getting the Blowfish key, and decrypting the MP3s encoded on the disc, or by breaking the protection to rip the.WAVs to your hard drive. Either option would be in violation of the DMCA, should you be so unfortunate as to live in a jurisdiction where that craptacular piece of law applies.
> The Content has been encoded using software that incorporates the LAME encoder; more information
about the encoder is available at http:// www.mp3dev.org.
Anyone know at what bitrate they've encoded the encrypted MP3s? (I'd hope 192, but I'd bet 128.)
At least it's a quality encoder. I wonder if the guys who wrote LAME could modify the license agreement to prohibit such use in the future?
On the other hand - did anyone catch the bit about "Software from EverAd" in the musichelponline.com/legal page?
Aren't they a known spyware vendor? (Come to think of it, spyware would be the first thing I'd expect to find in a proprietary player supplied by the music industry.)
>The nasa press release [nasa.gov] doesn't say anything about the cameras being turned off:
Cool! (And thanks, dude!)
Until NASA says otherwise, I'm putting it down to "CNN fscked up again". Likely cause of fsckup - NASA guy says "These are the last Io pictures we're getting", and some journalism major who doesn't know the difference between Io, Jupiter, Amalthea, and his ass.
Yeah, I know Amalthea's just a captured asteroid, but I wanna know what all that red crap is. Probably Ionian sulfur, but if we can get an idea of how thick the layer is and a better idea of what it's made of, we can learn more about Io as well. Schweet!
> Before its final plunge, Galileo will make the first close flyby of Amalthea, a small, inner moon of Jupiter, in November 2002.
Which is why I'm kinda pissed-off about the report of the camera shutdown (from the CNN article -- "The mission budget does not cover any further pictures") after the Io flyby.
Does anyone know if CNN fscked up (perhaps by misinterpreting "we're shutting down the cameras until late 2002 because we're not flying near anything interesting for a while"), or if we've given up on imaging Amalthea altogether?
(Or, is there simply not enough time to send back both the data from the Amalthea approach and get Amalthea images before Jupiter impact, in which case the data takes priority. Or is the radiation field around Amalthea so intense that we couldn't get pictures even if we tried? Any space geeks know what's really going on?)
> By the time Napster went down, everyone had what they wanted from the Industry's back catalog.
Good point. I look at my 4-5 years' worth of MP3-collecting (and I'd gladly have paid $0.50-1.00 per track in that collection), and realized that by trying so hard to get everything, RIAA wound up with nothing.
(Mod my ass as Flamebait for this, but didn't everyone know about Gnutella's scaling problems, and for-pay Napster sucking ass, based on Slashdot stories months and weeks before today?)
> A Proprietary Format - So, I can't just deposit MP3s on a CD and have hours of listening delight? That sucks. I'm paying
to get music and I get a lame-ass proprietary crap format that can't be read by anything but Napster's own player. That alone
is enough to keep me from paying.
More to the point -- that alone is enough to keep me from using. Even if.nap were free as in beer, I wouldn't bother.
Anyone got portable devices that play Liquid Audio? Oggs?.NAPs? Anyone? Bueller?
Hurlig Frootmig, HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy Editor Emeritus of Megadodo Publications, and the being responsible for the editing of Ford Prefect's entry for "Earth" into the two-word mostly harmless, had this to say:
We've reviewed the 5000-word review at "http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/paynapste r.html", and, well, seeing as how there are a hundred billion other P2P file-sharing applications in the Galaxy (and at least a hundred on Earth alone), and only a limited amount of space in the book's database, we've had to trim it a bit.
> [Belarc Advisor] You'll likely discover software you didn't know you had.
Well, from the standpoint of those who fund the SPA, isn't that the point?
"Shit, I don't remember ordering 30 licenses of XP and 5 copies of Adobe Premiere for my 30-person Solaris-only shop, but I must have, 'cuz the SPA's audit software said I did!"
> this is also why the RIAA and the MPAA should be considered monopolies, because once the few big 'competitors' are in bed
together, they may as well be one company.
Oh, great. Stop giving Rosen and Valenti ideas.
"We notice that you have both a television and a computer with speakers and a CD-ROM drive. The HCA (Home Content Alliance) would like to audit your home to ensure that you're entitled to view all the content you happen to own.
Your credit card records show that your purchases of DVDs and major-label CDs are in the first quartile - that is, 75% of the population purchases more RIAA and MPAA-endorsed content than you. Are you sure you're legit?
If you're not legit, we're offering an amnesty. You have until January 31, 2002 to purchase the CDs of all the MP3z you've ever listened to, and the DVDs of all the DiVX;-)'s you're watching.
Our agents will be breaking down your door^W^W^W^Wcontacting you shortly. Thank you for helping support our efforts to bring Americans more quality entertainment!"
> Also, under the current law, there are special provisions about who is liable if my credit card gets stolen and used. They specifically
limit my liability to $50. Without those special laws would the credit card company be liable, or would I? After all, with better security
features, the crook wouldn't be able to use my card.
Depends entirely on the laws (or lack thereof) that would replace the current regime.
If the law were structured that you were liable for all amounts incurred on your credit card, even after theft, victims of card theft would be broke.
If the law were structured that the credit card company was liable, even for the first $50, all credit cards would be secure, and using a stolen card or automatically-generated credit card number would be impossible.
The crux of the debate is that if software companies were legally liable for more of the damages arising from security holes in their products, there'd be a hell of a lot less security holes.
The cost of Fucking Up when writing software for nuke plants and hospitals and spacecraft is Very High. Such software developers rarely Fuck Up.
The cost of Fucking Up when writing the operating system with a 90% market share is Very Low. Such software developers Fuck Up on a daily basis.
Seems pretty clear how to get less Fucking Up to happen. (What's remains to be seen is whether or not the consumer is willing to pay the cost of having less Fuckups. Sadly, the 90% marketshare of one particular bunch of Fuckups is indication that the consumer isn't willing to pay that much for security.)
> How about an advanced cache system, a master cache or multimedia files as they get sent, files matching the same name/size/crc value get
sent down to smaller cache hubs. Larger isps could host these cache hubs, the incentive for them would be less bandwidth external to the
network.
> I therefore start the campaign for more blinkinlights.
Take the filter on the fan grill on the front of the case. Stick a blue LED behind it. Hook the blue LED up to either your NIC's network-use light.
Next to the blue LED, get one of those traffic-light-green LEDs (regular green LEDs are lame. The traffic-light-green ones look like the green stuff behind the heads of Borg drones), and hook it up to your hard drive use light.
The ventilation holes (you don't have ventilation holes in front of your case? drill some;-) will then be backlit by a diffuse (by the fan's filter) green/blue source, and flicker eerily, changing color as you use more network or disk resources.
Similar hacks for other stuff - modem RX/TX pins on your serial port, or a graphic equalizer hooked into your sound card - are also feasible.
Use the guts of one of those little outdoor thermometers to give yourself an LCD "case temperature" display.
Your blinkenlights are out there, you just gotta work at finding 'em!
> What is the point of saving space when your PC has a massive, ugly case anyway? If desktop size
and beauty are important to you then pick up an iMac.
Agreed - for now, I'm a CRT bigot, and I'll remain a CRT bigot until such time as LCDs can give me better resolution and better refresh rates (that is, less flicker when scrolling/gaming) than CRTs at a comparable price.
LCDs have gotten good. Damn good. For instance, I'd no longer hesitate to use a laptop as my main "work" computer today.
But for home use - where I'm planning on using it as a computer, TV, DVD player, and gaming box (YMMV, of course), I'm sticking with CRTs.
The limiting factor for CRTs (for me) isn't relative footprint, it's absolute footprint.
That is, if you offered me a choice between a 24" LCD, a 19" CRT, and a 24" CRT, I'd likely go with the 19" CRT, because that's all that fits on my desk unless I start carving holes in the drywall.
If, a year or two from now, someone develops a tech to narrow the depth of the tube and allow that 24" CRT to fit in the same "depth" as a present-day 19" or 17" CRT, I'll choose it over even a 24" LCD. Sure, the hypothetical 24" LCD gives me more desk space -- but that's space behind the screen, which I never use anyways.
(And on the 24" front -- considering the problems inherent with LCDs and wide viewing angles, how are present-technology LCDs ever going to scale beyond 21"?)
Personally, I think we're going to wind up with micromechanical systems and retinal projection in the long run. Isn't the human eyeball's limit something like 4096x4096x32-bit?
> I don't know about you guys, but Tom's is one of the prime places I check out for hardware reviews.
Tom's used to be
the same for me.
But when it took
longer to render
each of the 20 pages
of HTML
at one paragraph
per pageview and
4-5 banner ads,
I stopped reading
Tom's Hardware
.
Which is a shame -- I cut my PC-hardware teeth in the early Pentium-I era learning about the distinctions between chipsets, the various busses and their overclockability, etc. at Tom's. Now I go to Anand, or any other similar site that features a "Print this!" button on their pages, and/or at least more than one sentence per pageview.
That said, Samsung was pretty braindead to dismiss hardware websites as inferior to print magazines as sources for reviews. Particularly for leading-edge products (like LCD panels), you've gotta get the early-adopter mindshare, and I don't know any early adopters who get their tech information from dead trees anymore. (By the time the dead-tree magazine is printed, half the information in it, and all the pricing, is obsolete.)
> The robots will undoubtedly affect the environment. If the engineer(-ing students?) involved do
their job correctly, though, they'll minimize potential harmful impact.
Holy crap. It was $295 when I bought one to use as an "answering machine" almost ten years ago.
If you're looking for a Bigmouth, hunt around in a surplus store first, as you might get lucky. It's an 8-bit ISA card. Odds are that everything it did can now be replaced with a bit of software and your sound card.
> However, civil liberties
groups claim that the ban would infringe their first amendment rights. Other experts claim that anyone can create a
file deletion program with even basic programming knowledge. > >We interviewed one expert who explained how:
"One simple way to make sure your data is wiped clean, is remove the hard drive from your computer, and place it
in a furnace for 15-20 minutes." the interview was cut short, when government agents stormed the building and
arrested the expert for "discussing circumnavigation devices for data deletion".
All charges were dropped and Hilary Rosen was released later that afternoon.
A spokesperson for Ms. Rosen was later quoted as saying "We are pleased the government clearly recognizes that the First Amendment guarantees our legitimate corporate interest in constructing new and innovative digital rights management schemes."
> poor people are less likely
to have computers. This has a number of impacts on their lives, both economic and cultural, which have also been
rehashed endlessly. If ways can be found to get computers for more of them, or to reduce the economic sacrifices they
have to make to get them, can we all agree that it is a good thing?
You can give a computer to a Homo Habilis, and he'll use it - but he'll use it to crack nuts.
What educational value does a computer provide to someone who may not even be able to read?
If you assert that it's "better" to get the news from cnn.com than from watching TV, that's fine -- but people with poor reading skills won't start reading cnn.com because they have a computer, they'll continue to watch TV. They won't "learn" a damn thing until they want to. (They'll play Quake on it, they'll enjoy MP3s, they'll get advertised at by AOL, but they won't learn unless they want to learn.)
Anyone (poor or not) who does want to use a computer to to learn stuff, or to educate their kids, has probably already spent the $100 for a Pentium-class PC and pirated the educational software required.
I see the "digital divide" as a red herring. As others have pointed out, it sounds good, and it's a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. It's a problem in search of a solution in search of a problem, if you will. The only ones likely to benefit are those who take your money for the solution.
> I stayed up for over 112
hours (roughly 4.5 days) straight though a mixture of pluck, fear, and caffiene pills. By the end of this ordeal, I was literally
barking mad.
Wow, dude, you rock! (Are you sure you didn't get any sleep in the form of microsleeps or half-hour catnaps? Highest I heard of when I was in college was in the 80s.)
My record was 72 hours, with hallucinations (basically, dreaming while "awake" during 5-10-second microsleeps, seeing color on a monochrome display) starting in the mid-50s, going away for another half-day, and then coming back in the late 60s.
> "Seven beer-teen and without even? You must be over. Totally joking
over my and."
For laughs, I started writing stuff down around that point, and got similar results. Had to really double-check the paper I was trying to finish up around 45-48 hours. Caught all the really bad ones about stuff like green elves in the cable.
> Get your sleep. It's good for you.
That it is. But sleep deprivation is fun to play with, so long as you don't expect to be productive after a certain point. (The code was done around 36 hours, the paper got handed in around 50 hours, and I went to an all-night dance party and declared myself a designated driver to get enough free caffeinated drinks to keep myself awake for the wraparound to 72. Needless to say, I didn't have a car, and even if I had, I wouldn't have dreamt of driving past about hour 24.;-)
> Both Word and Excel have extensive "Save As..." features. These dumb users that you complain about don't need to install a copy of EMACS to send you a plain text file.
True -- but the point was that when asked not to send it in Word format, the user didn't think "Oh, SaveAs->.TXT", they thought "Oh, they must want it in.XLS, because that's the only other way I know to enter data." (Don't forget, with file extensions hidden, there's no way for them to tell the difference between "List of names.txt" and "List of names.doc")
> And by telling them you "don't do Windows" instead of explaining the real problem -
Sorry, I wasn't being clear. The actual request was more along the lines of "My workstation runs Solaris, not Windows; there are no applications on it that can read Word documents [well, it was true at the time this happened!] Could you please re-send the list of names in a non-proprietary format so I can read it? Thanx!"
The result was a.XLS file, containing a list of 200 names, one per cell, in the leftmost column.
Only after walking over to the (l)user's desk and asking for a hardcopy did I realize why I'd gotten a.XLS file -- the user basically said "Well, you said you didn't want it in Word format, so I made it in Excel."
A little further usability analysis revealed the (sad) underlying cause -- the person had no notion of the distinction between "operating system" and "application". They thought a "computer" was what you bought to run Office, and that Windows was just another application like Office, and that every computer came with all of the above.
In its own way, that's not a terribly inaccurate model -- from the user's viewpoint, the "office" (businessplace) "ran" (functioned, relied-upon) on "Office" (the productivity suite), and "Windows" (the OS) was merely "part of" (something everyone used, just like they use Word or Excel) the "computer" (thing on the desktop).
The notion that any computer could exist without Windows, Word, or Excel was inconceivable, because every computer the user had ever seen had always used all three.
> which would be a valid point, if we were talking about a car. We're not. We're talking about a
word processor. My word processor doesn't cost $26,000. I can't lose my life using a spreadsheet.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Yes.
2) No. From the legal page -- "The Player includes technology of EverAd Inc., Midbar Tech Ltd., and QDesign Corp.;" EverAd is a known spyware product.
3) You can't - at least not without reverse-engineering the player, getting the Blowfish key, and decrypting the MP3s encoded on the disc, or by breaking the protection to rip the .WAVs to your hard drive. Either option would be in violation of the DMCA, should you be so unfortunate as to live in a jurisdiction where that craptacular piece of law applies.
Anyone know at what bitrate they've encoded the encrypted MP3s? (I'd hope 192, but I'd bet 128.)
At least it's a quality encoder. I wonder if the guys who wrote LAME could modify the license agreement to prohibit such use in the future?
On the other hand - did anyone catch the bit about "Software from EverAd" in the musichelponline.com/legal page?
Aren't they a known spyware vendor? (Come to think of it, spyware would be the first thing I'd expect to find in a proprietary player supplied by the music industry.)
Cool! (And thanks, dude!)
Until NASA says otherwise, I'm putting it down to "CNN fscked up again". Likely cause of fsckup - NASA guy says "These are the last Io pictures we're getting", and some journalism major who doesn't know the difference between Io, Jupiter, Amalthea, and his ass.
Yeah, I know Amalthea's just a captured asteroid, but I wanna know what all that red crap is. Probably Ionian sulfur, but if we can get an idea of how thick the layer is and a better idea of what it's made of, we can learn more about Io as well. Schweet!
Which is why I'm kinda pissed-off about the report of the camera shutdown (from the CNN article -- "The mission budget does not cover any further pictures") after the Io flyby.
Does anyone know if CNN fscked up (perhaps by misinterpreting "we're shutting down the cameras until late 2002 because we're not flying near anything interesting for a while"), or if we've given up on imaging Amalthea altogether?
(Or, is there simply not enough time to send back both the data from the Amalthea approach and get Amalthea images before Jupiter impact, in which case the data takes priority. Or is the radiation field around Amalthea so intense that we couldn't get pictures even if we tried? Any space geeks know what's really going on?)
Good point. I look at my 4-5 years' worth of MP3-collecting (and I'd gladly have paid $0.50-1.00 per track in that collection), and realized that by trying so hard to get everything, RIAA wound up with nothing.
Napster: Sucks ass.
Gnutella: Doesn't scale.
(Mod my ass as Flamebait for this, but didn't everyone know about Gnutella's scaling problems, and for-pay Napster sucking ass, based on Slashdot stories months and weeks before today?)
More to the point -- that alone is enough to keep me from using. Even if .nap were free as in beer, I wouldn't bother.
Anyone got portable devices that play Liquid Audio? Oggs? .NAPs? Anyone? Bueller?
We've reviewed the 5000-word review at "http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/paynapste r.html", and, well, seeing as how there are a hundred billion other P2P file-sharing applications in the Galaxy (and at least a hundred on Earth alone), and only a limited amount of space in the book's database, we've had to trim it a bit.
"Sucks ass"
Well, from the standpoint of those who fund the SPA, isn't that the point?
"Shit, I don't remember ordering 30 licenses of XP and 5 copies of Adobe Premiere for my 30-person Solaris-only shop, but I must have, 'cuz the SPA's audit software said I did!"
Oh, great. Stop giving Rosen and Valenti ideas.
Depends entirely on the laws (or lack thereof) that would replace the current regime.
If the law were structured that you were liable for all amounts incurred on your credit card, even after theft, victims of card theft would be broke.
If the law were structured that the credit card company was liable, even for the first $50, all credit cards would be secure, and using a stolen card or automatically-generated credit card number would be impossible.
The crux of the debate is that if software companies were legally liable for more of the damages arising from security holes in their products, there'd be a hell of a lot less security holes.
The cost of Fucking Up when writing software for nuke plants and hospitals and spacecraft is Very High. Such software developers rarely Fuck Up.
The cost of Fucking Up when writing the operating system with a 90% market share is Very Low. Such software developers Fuck Up on a daily basis.
Seems pretty clear how to get less Fucking Up to happen. (What's remains to be seen is whether or not the consumer is willing to pay the cost of having less Fuckups. Sadly, the 90% marketshare of one particular bunch of Fuckups is indication that the consumer isn't willing to pay that much for security.)
Congratulations, you've just invented USENET!
Take the filter on the fan grill on the front of the case. Stick a blue LED behind it. Hook the blue LED up to either your NIC's network-use light.
Next to the blue LED, get one of those traffic-light-green LEDs (regular green LEDs are lame. The traffic-light-green ones look like the green stuff behind the heads of Borg drones), and hook it up to your hard drive use light.
The ventilation holes (you don't have ventilation holes in front of your case? drill some ;-) will then be backlit by a diffuse (by the fan's filter) green/blue source, and flicker eerily, changing color as you use more network or disk resources.
Similar hacks for other stuff - modem RX/TX pins on your serial port, or a graphic equalizer hooked into your sound card - are also feasible.
Use the guts of one of those little outdoor thermometers to give yourself an LCD "case temperature" display.
Your blinkenlights are out there, you just gotta work at finding 'em!
Appleheads have the iMac. PCheads have case modding. To each his own ;)
Agreed - for now, I'm a CRT bigot, and I'll remain a CRT bigot until such time as LCDs can give me better resolution and better refresh rates (that is, less flicker when scrolling/gaming) than CRTs at a comparable price.
LCDs have gotten good. Damn good. For instance, I'd no longer hesitate to use a laptop as my main "work" computer today.
But for home use - where I'm planning on using it as a computer, TV, DVD player, and gaming box (YMMV, of course), I'm sticking with CRTs.
The limiting factor for CRTs (for me) isn't relative footprint, it's absolute footprint.
That is, if you offered me a choice between a 24" LCD, a 19" CRT, and a 24" CRT, I'd likely go with the 19" CRT, because that's all that fits on my desk unless I start carving holes in the drywall.
If, a year or two from now, someone develops a tech to narrow the depth of the tube and allow that 24" CRT to fit in the same "depth" as a present-day 19" or 17" CRT, I'll choose it over even a 24" LCD. Sure, the hypothetical 24" LCD gives me more desk space -- but that's space behind the screen, which I never use anyways.
(And on the 24" front -- considering the problems inherent with LCDs and wide viewing angles, how are present-technology LCDs ever going to scale beyond 21"?)
Personally, I think we're going to wind up with micromechanical systems and retinal projection in the long run. Isn't the human eyeball's limit something like 4096x4096x32-bit?
> CRT tube
> ATM machne
> PIN number
> GPS system
> SSN number
> >
> It's fun when acronyms become words.
Hey! You forgot GNU's Not UNIX! ;)
Tom's used to be
the same for me.
But when it took
longer to render
each of the 20 pages
of HTML
at one paragraph
per pageview and
4-5 banner ads,
I stopped reading
Tom's Hardware
.
Which is a shame -- I cut my PC-hardware teeth in the early Pentium-I era learning about the distinctions between chipsets, the various busses and their overclockability, etc. at Tom's. Now I go to Anand, or any other similar site that features a "Print this!" button on their pages, and/or at least more than one sentence per pageview.
That said, Samsung was pretty braindead to dismiss hardware websites as inferior to print magazines as sources for reviews. Particularly for leading-edge products (like LCD panels), you've gotta get the early-adopter mindshare, and I don't know any early adopters who get their tech information from dead trees anymore. (By the time the dead-tree magazine is printed, half the information in it, and all the pricing, is obsolete.)
Oh, sure ;-)
Holy crap. It was $295 when I bought one to use as an "answering machine" almost ten years ago.
If you're looking for a Bigmouth, hunt around in a surplus store first, as you might get lucky. It's an 8-bit ISA card. Odds are that everything it did can now be replaced with a bit of software and your sound card.
>
>We interviewed one expert who explained how: "One simple way to make sure your data is wiped clean, is remove the hard drive from your computer, and place it in a furnace for 15-20 minutes." the interview was cut short, when government agents stormed the building and arrested the expert for "discussing circumnavigation devices for data deletion".
All charges were dropped and Hilary Rosen was released later that afternoon.
A spokesperson for Ms. Rosen was later quoted as saying "We are pleased the government clearly recognizes that the First Amendment guarantees our legitimate corporate interest in constructing new and innovative digital rights management schemes."
foraging and farming.
(Obviously a guy who's never attended a LAN party
You can give a computer to a Homo Habilis, and he'll use it - but he'll use it to crack nuts.
What educational value does a computer provide to someone who may not even be able to read?
If you assert that it's "better" to get the news from cnn.com than from watching TV, that's fine -- but people with poor reading skills won't start reading cnn.com because they have a computer, they'll continue to watch TV. They won't "learn" a damn thing until they want to. (They'll play Quake on it, they'll enjoy MP3s, they'll get advertised at by AOL, but they won't learn unless they want to learn.)
Anyone (poor or not) who does want to use a computer to to learn stuff, or to educate their kids, has probably already spent the $100 for a Pentium-class PC and pirated the educational software required.
I see the "digital divide" as a red herring. As others have pointed out, it sounds good, and it's a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. It's a problem in search of a solution in search of a problem, if you will. The only ones likely to benefit are those who take your money for the solution.
It's a literacy divide, not a digital one.
Wow, dude, you rock! (Are you sure you didn't get any sleep in the form of microsleeps or half-hour catnaps? Highest I heard of when I was in college was in the 80s.)
My record was 72 hours, with hallucinations (basically, dreaming while "awake" during 5-10-second microsleeps, seeing color on a monochrome display) starting in the mid-50s, going away for another half-day, and then coming back in the late 60s.
> "Seven beer-teen and without even? You must be over. Totally joking over my and."
For laughs, I started writing stuff down around that point, and got similar results. Had to really double-check the paper I was trying to finish up around 45-48 hours. Caught all the really bad ones about stuff like green elves in the cable.
> Get your sleep. It's good for you.
That it is. But sleep deprivation is fun to play with, so long as you don't expect to be productive after a certain point. (The code was done around 36 hours, the paper got handed in around 50 hours, and I went to an all-night dance party and declared myself a designated driver to get enough free caffeinated drinks to keep myself awake for the wraparound to 72. Needless to say, I didn't have a car, and even if I had, I wouldn't have dreamt of driving past about hour 24. ;-)
True -- but the point was that when asked not to send it in Word format, the user didn't think "Oh, SaveAs->.TXT", they thought "Oh, they must want it in .XLS, because that's the only other way I know to enter data." (Don't forget, with file extensions hidden, there's no way for them to tell the difference between "List of names.txt" and "List of names.doc")
> And by telling them you "don't do Windows" instead of explaining the real problem -
Sorry, I wasn't being clear. The actual request was more along the lines of "My workstation runs Solaris, not Windows; there are no applications on it that can read Word documents [well, it was true at the time this happened!] Could you please re-send the list of names in a non-proprietary format so I can read it? Thanx!"
The result was a .XLS file, containing a list of 200 names, one per cell, in the leftmost column.
Only after walking over to the (l)user's desk and asking for a hardcopy did I realize why I'd gotten a .XLS file -- the user basically said "Well, you said you didn't want it in Word format, so I made it in Excel."
A little further usability analysis revealed the (sad) underlying cause -- the person had no notion of the distinction between "operating system" and "application". They thought a "computer" was what you bought to run Office, and that Windows was just another application like Office, and that every computer came with all of the above.
In its own way, that's not a terribly inaccurate model -- from the user's viewpoint, the "office" (businessplace) "ran" (functioned, relied-upon) on "Office" (the productivity suite), and "Windows" (the OS) was merely "part of" (something everyone used, just like they use Word or Excel) the "computer" (thing on the desktop).
The notion that any computer could exist without Windows, Word, or Excel was inconceivable, because every computer the user had ever seen had always used all three.
"Someday, man, someday..."
- Bill Gates.