At 10:58 AM 10/17/2006 -0400, Hal Kaplan wrote:
...
=> The file ThisIsCrap.ms should be opened even if it is
=> referenced as THISISCRAP.ms. Having 1 file named Thisiscrap.ms and
another allowed to
=> exist (in same directory) named ThisIsCrap.ms is ridiculous. It'll trip
up users often, and professionals frequently.
...
The business about confusing users is a canard. They learn quickly to
become case sensitive users. It's no different than driving a car with a
manual transmission. After a while it becomes automatic. People do not
like changes but they have an overwhelming desire to survive and if
survival means change, they will accept the changes and live with them
quite nicely.
Maybe your user-base is different than mine. The users I deal with often
stumble over case-sensitivity even in the data they enter. Any user that
I've dealt with that has a Linux machine has had a problem with the
case-sensitivity thing. In fact, they still call me. If they say they're
having a problem with a file, my first question has become ".. did you
check the exact capitalization?..." This resolves the issue about 7 out of
10 times. Some of them call every couple months.
Some users do learn faster than others, that is true. But of the ones that
have learned, I often get questions like: "Is there an option to turn of
capitalization in filenames?" (which really means they're tired of spending
the extra effort to go figure out the exact capitalization).
For myself, I had 1 client that had a linux box as their primary web
server. Part of our system involved ftp'ing files to that server, then
taking them off to other places inside the network (which had Windows
boxes). We hit some bizarre problems when we were trying to work with those
files. Turns out it was a capitalization problem. We were able to get it
figured out and eventually and force the naming accordingly. But what a
headache.
These are just my experiences that support my statement above. To say I was
perpetrating a canard was pretty rude of you. It's one thing to say you
don't agree with someone's premise. But to say they are lying and
misleading on purpose is pretty risky unless you have the data to back that up.
-Charlie
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