What I found interesting and very intelligent on his part, is that most of the users he bought stuff from to pump his positive feedback are Ebay regulars with 1000+ transactions to their credit. I think most people tend to put more stock in someone of that "stature" giving positive feedback.
> 1) What people are comfortable with. A lot of people want an easy, safe, predictable decision.
I think this thought has a lot to do with why they aren't recommended in "large" companies. I'm wondering what kind of cost/lost productivity would be incurred within a corporation with employee numbers in the thousands switching from a platform their employees know and are comfortable with (in most companies this is some form of Windows) to another platform. Most of the employees involved are not going to be the type of user that is quick to adapt to changes in the system they use. So you have a headache involved with training employees to use the new systems.
So if they have say 1000 people using Windows machines, and you decide to cut all the machines over to Macs that's a lot of computers that from management's view point were working just fine. If you replace systems with Macs as needed, then you haven't substantially reduced any IT requirements and in fact may have increased them if your current IT staff doesn't know how to support the new platform.
For new companies making IT decisions, then Macs may very well make more sense, but recommending them to large companies with a preexisting network of computers where the overhead would be massive to make a transition doesn't make a lot of sense.
Regarding servers, this may make a bit more sense as the user impact could be made mostly transparent with the exception of those admining the system and dealing with the hardware which are fairly small in number.
> But there was no pain changing from Netscape to IE. (Apart from the dubious quality of IE anyway.)
My memory may be failing me, but if I recall the major move to switch to IE came around version 4. When comparing IE 4 to Netscape 4 in terms of quality, Netscape came up well short. Up until that version of IE, I had been a Netscape user, but the difference in quality between those versions was significant enough to cause me to switch.
Thankfully, Mozilla has corrected this gap, and now exceeds IE in just about every conceivable way. But it's not really accurate to contend that Netscape lost that "war" to an inferior product.
The fact that the error messages are explained in the manual doesn't invalidate a complaint about the error message itself.
What lilo should do is print the error code, and a short description of the possible cause. If further information is needed, then the user can refer to the manual page.
If every application gave error codes similar to "See manual entry blah", when a short summary could have been provided instead, it would get rather annoying dealing with those applications.
I think another cause of confusion is users being unfamiliar with moving files around in explorer. The "average" user spends most of their time saving files to default locations or using applications that generally don't require them to deal with files in the first place.
While XP's cd burning inferface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with explorer, the addition of an inferface like those found in Nero and other 3rd party applications would provide a more handheld approach and thereby an easier experience for some users.
Being able to burn audio cds from media player is the right idea, but I'm not aware of a comprable application for burning data cds.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this was intended to be funny. Just a guess here. =P
What I found interesting and very intelligent on his part, is that most of the users he bought stuff from to pump his positive feedback are Ebay regulars with 1000+ transactions to their credit. I think most people tend to put more stock in someone of that "stature" giving positive feedback.
> 1) What people are comfortable with. A lot of people want an easy, safe, predictable decision.
I think this thought has a lot to do with why they aren't recommended in "large" companies. I'm wondering what kind of cost/lost productivity would be incurred within a corporation with employee numbers in the thousands switching from a platform their employees know and are comfortable with (in most companies this is some form of Windows) to another platform. Most of the employees involved are not going to be the type of user that is quick to adapt to changes in the system they use. So you have a headache involved with training employees to use the new systems.
So if they have say 1000 people using Windows machines, and you decide to cut all the machines over to Macs that's a lot of computers that from management's view point were working just fine. If you replace systems with Macs as needed, then you haven't substantially reduced any IT requirements and in fact may have increased them if your current IT staff doesn't know how to support the new platform.
For new companies making IT decisions, then Macs may very well make more sense, but recommending them to large companies with a preexisting network of computers where the overhead would be massive to make a transition doesn't make a lot of sense.
Regarding servers, this may make a bit more sense as the user impact could be made mostly transparent with the exception of those admining the system and dealing with the hardware which are fairly small in number.
> But there was no pain changing from Netscape to IE. (Apart from the dubious quality of IE anyway.)
My memory may be failing me, but if I recall the major move to switch to IE came around version 4. When comparing IE 4 to Netscape 4 in terms of quality, Netscape came up well short. Up until that version of IE, I had been a Netscape user, but the difference in quality between those versions was significant enough to cause me to switch.
Thankfully, Mozilla has corrected this gap, and now exceeds IE in just about every conceivable way. But it's not really accurate to contend that Netscape lost that "war" to an inferior product.
The fact that the error messages are explained in the manual doesn't invalidate a complaint about the error message itself.
What lilo should do is print the error code, and a short description of the possible cause. If further information is needed, then the user can refer to the manual page.
If every application gave error codes similar to "See manual entry blah", when a short summary could have been provided instead, it would get rather annoying dealing with those applications.
I think another cause of confusion is users being unfamiliar with moving files around in explorer. The "average" user spends most of their time saving files to default locations or using applications that generally don't require them to deal with files in the first place.
While XP's cd burning inferface is fairly intuitive for users familiar with explorer, the addition of an inferface like those found in Nero and other 3rd party applications would provide a more handheld approach and thereby an easier experience for some users.
Being able to burn audio cds from media player is the right idea, but I'm not aware of a comprable application for burning data cds.