Friday, January 07, 2000, 7:21:36 PM, Allie wrote:
> IOW, if user X, in the spirit of being human, fails to fill in the subject
> and messes up a thread, many innocents will suffer for it.
Noone suffered from it. People who replied could have just as easily
changed topics as well.
> This is different from you sitting at your own terminal, in the privacy of
> your home, and deleting an entire partition. I don't care about the latter
> happening to you because you didn't get a warning message. It's your
> partition, your mess up, your waterloo.
Meanwhile the partition that I deleted was when I was sitting at work and
mail for 7000+ customers was delayed for close to 5 hours while that partition
on a production machine, at work, was rebuilt. To me, that had more of an
impact that a missing subject.
> annoyingly natural and incurable habit of humans to overlook or forget
> things, especially things that may impact upon innocent others. That's one
> of the joys of computing.
"Humans are dumb, leave them that way." No thanks, improve the human, not
the program when it comes to *mistakes* like this. To coddle the user on each
potential mistake is to make a program unusable.
> major deletions are placed there because the incidence of major mistakes are
> high and the loss as result of these deletions far outweigh that of having
> to deal with the confirmation messages/dialogs.
Of this you and I differ in opinion. The time I lose in the years that I
don't make a mistake is far outweighed by the time I had to recall from
backups things inadvertently deleted.
> The fact that I or you work with precision and make few mistakes where
> deletions are concerned, is pretty much besides the point. For those who
> require the increased productivity (indirectly) through these confirmatory
> messages, they are just as important additions to the product as any other.
Incorrect. People should learn. If a person requires such things then
they have no business breathing, IMHO, because they are in the habit of doing
a lot of potential harmful things without doublechecking.
> Sure. I don't think anyone is arguing this. A subject header reminder is not
> a foofie. It can prevent messing up threads among other things. If you fill
> in your subject headers, you'll never see the popup message.
Yes, it is. In the grand scheme of things there are other solutions to
the problem which are far preferable.
> I never saw the popup message when using Agent. :)
You obviously never left out subjects like I do from time to time, on
purpose.
> In Agent, there's a options menu page called 'confirmations'. There you may
> enable or disable confirmation messages supported by the program, and guess
> what, the subject header notification message is one of the few not made
> optional.
Agent is also a mail reader and subjects are not required in mail.
> I mean, after all, it's a newsreader, and all messages posted to newsgroups
> should have a subject. :) Now *that's* an application for humans. :)
No, it is an application made for morons. You might think that the human
population consists of nothing more than drooling incompetents but I'd like to
think that those who do have enough intelligence to use computers should be
able to use them unhindered with the babysitting some people seem to require.
Not everyone is an idiot, Allie, and some would like to do what is technically
permitted.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
-------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
View the TBUDL archive at http://tbudl.thebat.dutaint.com
To send a message to the list moderation team double click here:
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To Unsubscribe from TBUDL, double click here and send the message:
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--------------------------------------------------------------
