On 2008-09-07, Roy Lanek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > When you look for an entry, you get a *window* of other, similar applications, > very often. It's like within a bookshop: you have your list of titles of books > to buy--then you see other books too, which may be interesting. And voila', > one group of cherries hook the next.
In a *proper* bookshop, you can try before you buy. You scan through the isles, find something interesting, can read the blurb, can scan through the pages, even read a few, to see if you might like it. Likewise you can download freeware and shareware to try before you buy, although it's a bit more cumbersome than scanning through a book in a *proper* bookshop. *Alas*, there's only one bookshop worth anything anymore in .fi, and it's (of course) 300km from where I live. Most of the so-called bookshops just sell sudoku sheets, biographies, Harry Potter, Dan Brown and stuff like that. So, alas, one is stuck to online bookshops (primarily amazon.co.uk, because the more local ones run by the dying brick&mortar bookshops are comparably expensive and slow^1) where one can't try before one buys. So one rather trusts external reviews and previous experience with a particular author, and only seldom buys something previously unknown. Anyway, choosing software by ratings on a site is like buying blindly from an online bookshops as opposed to a proper bookshop. (Some say that deregulation killed the bookshop; when the big box hypermarkets were allowed to sell books -- only mainstream crap, of course -- the masses started buying that mainstream crap from there, and the bookshops no longer could support sales and display of more marginal with larger sales of mainstream products.) (^1 And I'm not talking about super-fast courier services, just plain old snailmail, because I prefer picking up the package from the post office when it suits me to having to wait for a courier. The more local shops don't seem to have their own stock, instead ordering everything from the publisher, and this takes time.) > Uuuh, slashdot is even on the [proxy] list of my forbidden URLs, I also put in junkbuster (how approriate!) at some point, but later I've learned to mostly just stay away from time-waster sites full of idiots. -- Tuomo
