Comment Re:Enough Already (Score 1) 403
I agree with you that "it's the public's fault for playing with computers and relying on them so much without knowing what the hell they are doing with them". But I blame M$ for facilitating this behaviour. I know that the average "user" is pretty dumb and requires having things made easy for them.
BUT M$ has IMO done a horrible job of it; they and the other major commercial software manufacturers should have made more of an effort to meet users half-way. That is to say, enhance the computing experience *in a way which makes users realize what the technology is all about*. Honestly, I can't believe some of those tech support stories; and I'm convinced most of the sadder cases could have been prevented by better computer education.
We *should* be having remedial computer courses which illustrate the metaphors that programmers had in mind when they designed UIs, explain why things are the way they are, etc. - that is, which teach some basic hack sense to those which are deficient therein. What we *do* have are courses like "Learn to use M$ Word". People walk out of these courses not having learned anything about GUI consistency (pardon the pun), nor any basis on which to decide that M$ software sucks (granted not *everyone* would come to that conclusion even given proper education; #include here), nor anything which would help them if they had to (God forbid!) use another app to do the same thing, or another app from the Office suite. Just for an example.
I've seen people who, as a direct result of how the software and technology is marketed (especially with the "web integration" of "modern" OSes), fell under the false impression that "Yahoo" and "Altavista" were application programs on their desktop (some investigation on my part showed that these were in fact stripped-down versions of Netscape, actually identical to each other except for the home page on which they started). It's sickening, really.
Zahlman, aka namlhaZ
zahlman at freewwweb dot com
BUT M$ has IMO done a horrible job of it; they and the other major commercial software manufacturers should have made more of an effort to meet users half-way. That is to say, enhance the computing experience *in a way which makes users realize what the technology is all about*. Honestly, I can't believe some of those tech support stories; and I'm convinced most of the sadder cases could have been prevented by better computer education.
We *should* be having remedial computer courses which illustrate the metaphors that programmers had in mind when they designed UIs, explain why things are the way they are, etc. - that is, which teach some basic hack sense to those which are deficient therein. What we *do* have are courses like "Learn to use M$ Word". People walk out of these courses not having learned anything about GUI consistency (pardon the pun), nor any basis on which to decide that M$ software sucks (granted not *everyone* would come to that conclusion even given proper education; #include here), nor anything which would help them if they had to (God forbid!) use another app to do the same thing, or another app from the Office suite. Just for an example.
I've seen people who, as a direct result of how the software and technology is marketed (especially with the "web integration" of "modern" OSes), fell under the false impression that "Yahoo" and "Altavista" were application programs on their desktop (some investigation on my part showed that these were in fact stripped-down versions of Netscape, actually identical to each other except for the home page on which they started). It's sickening, really.
Zahlman, aka namlhaZ
zahlman at freewwweb dot com
