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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Are You Sure You Want To Do That Which You Don't Understand? 4 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I think this is a specific case of the general trend in PCs: people want control over the machine, but are not interested in learning to do so competently.

    My hero would be someone who comes up with a way to give people enough control to make them happy, while still making it hard for them to fall prey to malware. I don't think it's possible, though.
    • people want control over the machine [...] are not interested in learning to do so competently.

      Even though that might be the case sometimes, I'm pretty sure many users out there are interested, but just don't have what it takes, which includes resources (somebody teaching them, perhaps), sufficient knowledge to support what they're about to learn, etc.

      Actually, I don't even think some of them would understand the concept of having "control over the machine"... many of them think they already have it :-

  • I know it's a design guideline for the Windows teams (long web page about this somewhere, can't find at the moment) that basically says: if the user won't understand the message and/or there's nothing they can do about it, there's no point in prompting them.

    The discussion came out of the installer asking questions like "I've found a different version of FOO.DLL, would you like to replace it?". Grandma isn't going to understand that. Even someone with experience might not be sure how to answer that. (If
  • One of the problems with development of large programs/systems is that errors/conditions seem to get summarized, more and more, the closer they get to the user. This tends to remove most of the useful information for the knowledgable end-user. Even if the errors are annotated as they move up the call tree, there is a tendancy to only display one unified message to the user -- I'm assuming to avoid confusing them.

    Just yesterday on my Mac, Norton AntiVirus said something meaningfull like "Virus updated fail

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