OT: Why it is better to pretend you know nothing about computers

[tony sayer]

In article , Tony Houghton scribeth thus

Well I've plugged USB mice in and don't seem to have that problem?..

[tony sayer]

I haven't set it up but cannot you send it off the "file" menu?..

[tony sayer]

In article , Tim Streater scribeth thus

So how do you get around this problem then in other OS or text processing systems?..

I can't really say its a problem as such for me FWIW...

[Steve Firth]

50% of the population is subnormal, by definition.

[tony sayer]

So what's better then?.. If that seriously is a problem?..

[tony sayer]

That does seem to be rather nit picking?.

I've never found it a problem!..

So do you really need yet another button to push?, and consider it does restart and log off etc..

[tony sayer]

AIUI it is can be set to user log on as admin user guest etc?..

And what system is immune for that then?.

Tho I don't recall anyone saying that a serious problem and or a big issue?..

How exactly seeing that many people write different programmes for Windows?..and I suppose will do it their way?..

Really?, Are we talking about the same thing?. I know of several people using WIN 7 and none of them complain about that!. and they the people who would and Do moan if given half a chance.

Of the several firms and offices we see most weeks the only consistent complaint is that the "servers down" or bu**ered again cos of the IT Admin people;!..

So what do you use and what would you recommend for most all average user, let say business and home user?..

[Tim Streater]

Do pay attention. I already explained that on my machine, I move or rename the file and and any app that has it open just updates the file name it uses. Happens automatically.

[Adrian C]

What's an iPod?

[Adrian C]

So, similary the start menu is labelled with "switch user", "log off", "lock", "restart", "sleep", "hibernate" ...

No longer labelled 'start', it's become an icon like the Apple Menu icon it was ripped from ...

[Victor Meldrew]

Another caring sharing usenet personality, well done !

[Daniel James]

Why is it ludicrous?

There's a whole world of trade-offs and compromises in the way that running applications interact with filesystems. Different OSes handle open files in different ways, with different performance guarantees and different observable behaviours. There's no absolute here, all of those choices are the right choices for /some/ situations, just maybe not the situations that /you/ find yourself in.

What I do find to be ridiculous is that when I try to do something with a file in Windows and I can't because some application has that file open all Windows can tell me is that the operation failed. What *is* ludicrous is that it doesn't explain why the operation failed, and tell me which application(s) I have to close in order to be able to do what I want. That might actually be helpful.

Cheers, Daniel.

[Daniel James]

I was thinking the same thing ... why would ANY application need a special option to send its data by mail?

I think the answer is twofold:

1. Programmers were told to make the program more "mail friendly", at a time when EMail was /the/ latest thing, and everyone wanted to boast support for it ... and nobody could think of anything in particular that needed to be done to make it so.
2. Users are too stupid to be able to locate or identify the file on disk that contains the data they want to send. Not having the "send by EMail" option within the program means they can't send the data at all, or they keep sending the wrong file.

In other words: a text editor should not need a send-to-mail option, but bizarrely it does.

Cheers, Daniel.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Linux, more or less, and to a lesser extent OS-X.

No big issue for me. One learns to deal with the way one OS works. Or in my case, and OS-X, never really learns..to like it.

It probably runs windows.

If you can get all the apps you need, Linux for stability and speed and no extraneous bullshit.

And a windows virtual machine to run the few windows apps you have to have.

[Rob Morley]

And therefore in somewhat limited supply, and not very descriptive.

[dennis]

What about the case where the file doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because its an attachment in an email and not a separate file on disk until someone saves it on some mail programs. That doesn't stop you opening it in word and using the send to email and you still don't have the attachment as a file on disk.

[Steve Firth]

Thanks for proving my point.

[Steve Firth]

Umm no.

The entire interface is ripped off. And most of the internals bear a startling resemblance to the no-longer produced versions of MacOS. At once time Windows primitives for drawing the interface had the same names, same parameters as those in MacOS.

[Daniel James]

That depends on the copy operation or EMail program only opening the file read-only, and on word only locking against parallel updates.

You're mostly safe, nowadays, but many older programs do typically open a file with full read/write access even if they only want to read it. Those programs will not be able to open the file at the same time as word.

Cheers, Daniel.

[Daniel James]

Hey! That was a sweeping generalization, you're not supposed to ask for details .

I have better things to do than stand over a PC with a stopwatch (an hourglass would probably do) and tell you which aspects of Vista's more egregious failures to perform as well as XP have been ameliorated in 7.

Among the worst offenders were various file operations, particularly over the network, some of which I understand are a little quicker in 7 than in Vista, but both are sluggish compared with XP.

To the user.

I use Vista at work, and on a dual quad-core Xeon machine with 8GB RAM it's not bad. Not good, just not bad. Apart from the Search "facility" in explorer, which sucks like a sucky thing near a black hole.

Let me be clear. I'm not suggesting that 7 isn't an improvement over Vista, just that it's not the staggering "as good as XP" improvement that some people would have the world believe. I'd rather use 7 than Vista myself, but I see very few reasons to use either rather than XP.

Cheers, Daniel.