Discussions

When you guys want to relax, what's your favourite recreational software? Just to get the ball going, I'd vote for puzzles (http://www.clickmazes.com is magnificent) adventure games (my personal favourite is Myst) and simulations (I've just purchased Trainz 2004, which looks superb). John

Apologies for posting a usage question in a developers' forum. If anyone knows of a better place, don't hesitate to tell me where to shove it (ho, ho). Encarta 2000 has an auto-complete feature for queries. Personally, I don't like it as it corrupts what I'm typing and almost always changes it to something I don't want. I can't find any way of disabling it in the user interface. Does anyone know of a registry hack? John

Regarding wizards, I tend to disagree with you. Imagine program installation without a wizard, for example. I think Wizards hark back to the days when you felt that you were holding a conversation with the computer, one question (or one command) at a time. I think the Apple/Windows "you can do anything, anytime" interface was not only a gigantic mistake in terms of usability, it was also a technical disaster because of its huge size, its complexity and its fragility. Running more than program at the same time is highly useful, copying and pasting between them likewise, but being able to choose any option at any time (except for the ones with are greyed out but you can't figure out why) is not. All this of course is just my humble opinion, and not what most people think. John

Regarding auto-complete, auto-format and auto-correct, I'm with you all the way on this one Jamie! I've never met a user, a support person or a developer who doesn't hate them with venemous passion. Most people disable them as quickly as possible, the rest just swear and hit something hard when they mess up what they're doing. I suppose they appeal to non-computer literate management, who are fooled into thinking that these wretched things will make their staff more productive. I particularly hate the ones which can't be disabled permanantly through the user interface, such as the automatic table column width wrecking in Word 2000. Each newly created table has to have this property corrected. Ugh! John

(Sorry about the long quote above; I can't get rid of it. Nor can I insert any line breaks.) I was only dreaming. And reminiscing how good it was to be able to switch a Commodore 64 off and on to completely reset it, in less time that it took for the monitor to wam up. It seems we totally lost the way somewhere back then, going to operating system loaded from disk. I know the concept probably isn't practical now (although Koppix sounds interesting). I was really hoping someone would respond with some clever and revolutionary ideas somewhat along the same lines. Just a thought though - where do games consoles load their software from? Can it be corrupted/updated? Could a computer system based on the games console concept be developed into a word processor and Internet browser, which is all the majority of home users want? Regarding making perfect software, that's easy. Just make sure that the developers have to take all the calls from irate users at two o'clock in the morning. It sure worked for us! John

If the operating system was professionally tested and debugged before being released, it wouldn't need any updates. Obviously, I'm not talking about adapting Windows to work this way, that isn't feasible because of its fundamental architecture and its current early stage of development, with numerous bugs and design flaws still being discovered. I'm talking about something totally new. By the way, if you think about it, a lot of the security enhancements in SP2 are actually attempting to do exactly what I propose - protect the operating system against any unwanted changes. But, as I suggested in my original post, it would be far from easy to design a computer which combined unchangeable software and the power and flexibility that users, even home users, require. Some radical thinking would be required, starting with no assumptions. - John

Please forgive me a few very naive ramblings here: The earliest home computers held their operating systems in ROM. As well as speeding access (before the days of hard disks), this had the wonderful advantage that it could not be corrupted. The computer could always be returned to a pristine state by switching off and on. Programs were loaded from cassette tapes and couldn't be corrupted (only destroyed!). Many of the problems with modern home computers stems from storing the operating system and programs on hard disk, where they can easily be corrupted, either through bugs, user accidents, hardware glitches, or malicious software. How much do normal home users really need the flexibility that being able to modify the operating system provides? Yes, I know this is all extremely naive technically. One program's data file is another program's executable file (the most obvious example being compilers) and users most defintely want to be able to purchase and use programs additional to the operating system. But the current fragile house of cards, with DLL hell and almost weekly security nightmares, viruses, trojans, adware, etc is increasingly inappropriate for home users. So, has anyone thought about producing a computer with an operating system and programs which cannot be changed? I think there might be a huge market for such a device. - John

I'd just like to be able to consistently save web pages that I'm viewing to my hard disk. In IE6 (on WinXP SP1, fully up to date with patches), most of the time when I try to save a web page in IE it goes and downloads all the files again, then crashes out with a resounding "boom". If the save does appear to work, a lot of the time when I re-open the page from the hard disk copy there's nothing there. This is a major pain. Is all this misery a universal problem with IE6, or just my computer? So I use Netscape 7.1 instead, which always (touch wood) saves pages immediately and properly. It's also much safer from the security point of view of course, and quite a bit faster. I haven't had any problems with incompatible web sites with Netscape, and it has its own built-in pop-up blocker which saves the very small amount of labour installing the Google Toolbar. I tried Opera, Mozilla, etc but I don't like their tabs (very personal, that one) and their incompatibility with most online banking and e-commerce sites. John

I use SharpReader and like it, despite having to endure the bloated 24MB download of .NET Framework which it requires.

I find RSS  extremely useful to scan through a whole load of news stories and forum postings quicky.

I've tried to persuade various friends to try RSS, but with one exception nobody - technical or non-technical - showed the slightest bit of interest. I did eventually get one person (technical) to give it a go, but he hated it and said he far preferred to visit web sites.

Perhaps it's my lack of persuasive powers, but not entirely, I think. RSS for the general public appears to be a complete non-starter at the moment, sadly.

John

Some Microsoft product name combinations are very confusing to the general public. For example: Outlook and Outlook Express; Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer; and Windows XP and Office XP. Just to show that Microsoft don't have a monopoly on this type of confusoin, I should also include zip files and Zip disks. Finally of course there's Bill Gates and his brothers, And Gates, Or Gates and Not Gates - John