OT: Mark made my day!

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 05:28:13PM +0300, Peter Damoc wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:27:27 +0300, H. C. Brugmans <hcbrugmans at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> >Peter Damoc wrote:
> >> Great stuff! Now only if those bugs could be fixed in time for
> >> Breezy  
> 
> >It's hilarious. :)
> 
> It might be a little funny to you or me BUT looking from my mother's
> perspective (about a year in using computers, over 50 years old) is not
> that funny, perfectly valid points. 

He makes some valid points; Nautilus opening two icons on top of each
other is definitely a bug, for example; however on my system it's a long
since fixed bug, so I wonder if he's actually running Hoary released or
an old devel snapshot. Some of the rest is debatable, like: "Items can’t
be renamed by clicking on their names and typing." - No, they can't, but
how often do you want to rename files compared with how often you click
on them? Whenever I hit that 'feature' in other systems it's never what
I was trying to do and sometimes winds up with me renaming a perfectly
good file to a daft random typing name. Some of the rest is just plain
wrong, including:

>"In Ubuntu, telling the computer to shut down takes me about 35 seconds:
>choose “Log Out”, wait about 25 seconds for the logout process, then
>click “Shut Down” and confirm it in an alert."

You can do that if you must, of course, but a sane person would just
mark the 'Shutdown' option in the logout dialog and do it in one. There
are plenty of other places where the computer's clearly trying to help
but he's cocking it up anyway:

>"Every day when I log in, I am presented not with the documents and Web
>pages that I had open when I logged out the day before, but with the
>documents and Web pages that I had open when I logged out on Monday
>March 7th." followed by: "and I’m unlikely to find the solution without
>help"

He obviously saw the 'Save settings' option right in front of him on
March the 7th, and has not only completely forgotten, but also failed to
see it again in the five days since! 

Along with gems such as:

>"When returning after locking the screen, the interface for logging in
>again is completely different from that for logging in normally, for no
>apparent reason."
 
The reason, plainly apparent to me, at least, is that unlocking an
existing session and starting a new one are completely different
processes - the former is not 'logging in' by any means; you've been
logged in the whole time and possibly running useful work in hte
background. Possibly less obvious unless you know is that both gdm and
kdm can allow users to start new sessions while another is already
running. It helps to have different interfaces for the two very
different processes so that people don't accidentally start new logins
and leave the old ones hogging resources in the background when all they
want to do is turn the screensaver off.

He's a prat, and while he has a few valid points that's hardly
surprising; in amongst sixty nine whinges chance alone means he's got to
hit some good ones.

Ewan
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