In
<CAE1XxDGKJtnYr4g-RHW6=oyey4wf8-ym6nxvn+4ul5wz0l-...@mail.gmail.com>,
on 11/27/2013
at 02:21 PM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> said:
>I wish it were; but here the microsoft view that choices are the
>enemy is often correct.
I never found m$ software to be easy to use.
>Users do not ordinarily know "what they want to do" in any
>constructive sense. They have global ease-of-use and performance
>goals, functional objectives.
Sure, but dumbing down the software makes it *harder* for them to
achieve those goals, not easier.
>These issues can be clarified in written materials, workshops, and
>the like; but in my erxperience many users have little patience
>with the need to learn how systems work.
If they can't do 95% of their work without knowing the guts of the
system then it is *not* user friendly.
>We come down to choices that can be fudged a little but not much. A
>system can be easy to install, or it can he highly flexible and
>tunable. It cannot usually be both.
It can be, but usually isn't. The ones that are both took work to make
them that way.
>Here, as elsewhere, Le bon Dieu est dans le détail; but I doubt
>very much that Shmuel disposes of a deux es machina that bridges
>this dichotomy. Things can of course be made easy, on the model
>of those books that used to be called Calculus made easy or the
>like and are now called Calculus for dummies instead, which
>achieve their objectives by leaving the hard parts out.
Their objective is to seel the books. I had the misfortune to own one,
and it seemed to make no sense. It was only when I got a "harder" book
that things fell into place. Albert Einstein is quoted as having said
"Things should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler."
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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