From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3EF274C4.1000609@place.org> From: Stephen Wynne User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] The new ridiculous license References: <200306192319.h5JNJ1707171@augusta.math.psu.edu> <20030620115233.3dc850df.ggm@apnic.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:43:16 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: d2133b24-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 George Michaelson wrote: > The problem is really with PRINTERS. Good point. Printers need painful levels of attention no matter how one communicates with them. Which brings to mind my sense that our opinions about these things vary the depending on how much we know about them. Innovations are rare, change is continuous, and most of us have to suffer with whatever features and flaws are available. Most of you know a lot about system implementation. For a given area, some of you also know what works and what doesn't, and why. I think end users have some knowledge of that, but most of the time they just use what's in front of them, and complain about it in inarticulate terms, like "I had to work late unclogging that queue again!" I know from personal experience with lost hard disks, network glitches, and crashing printers. Isn't operating system innovation getting harder? I can't believe that user interfaces are getting easier. My 79 year-old father is less comfortable with the MacOS interface for 8.1 than he was with 3.0, and I'm sure he'd be happier with UNIX MH mail, most days, than he is with Microsoft Outlook. New activities involving the Internet and mail should have been simpler for him, but there are too many settings and graphical controls that don't matter, and it's a mystery as to where to find all the ones that do. I think we could learn a lot from asking an old man why he's not happy with a newer computer. I laughed when my dad asked me how to combine two instances of Exchange so that he had all of his mail and addresses in the same place. This was over the phone and I don't use MacOS, so I had to set the problem aside for a while. I'm sure he's beset by the problem of too many places for places to be on his storage hierarchy now, for one thing. Wouldn't Apple like us to believe that usability innovation had been improving for the last 20 years instead of merely holding the line, or even losing to increased system complexity?