5 ms·

When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate

When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. "You know, 'Uranus?'" Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing. Nope. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us. This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later. People on this site "govern" our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping it from happening again. Even after 30 years of "being on the internet," I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one shows up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention. The people who use Windows for any more than gaming (and a lot of them, too) are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn't be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off. It doesn't matter that we get upset about this. It's already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The economics just don't matter to Microsoft. I have to conclude that the size of the "power user"/developer community on Windows is dwarfed by the rest. The only surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.

hot_gril 3y ago
Very accurate. Think also about something you use daily but don't care much about. Maybe you have a "point A to B" car that just needs decent MPG. Car equivalent to Windows is a sagging Altima or a screeching Mirage.
xethos 3y ago
> which only works half the time anyway In case it can be as useful for you, or anyone else, as it has been for me: https://www.fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/frm-eng/MMCN-9EZV6S https://www.fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/frm-eng/MMCN-9E...
Derbasti 3y ago
Thank you. This is very true, and equally sad.
marcodiego 3y ago
> It's already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. I have a few points against this. First is that it is not that important if we can revert M$ (yes, sorry, I'll refer to them this way for this comment) behavior, the most important is that we should have alternatives. For that we must push hardware and software vendors to support other OS's, specially Linux. Second is that, by making a choice, we can influence statistics and this influence may be becoming strong enough to give us some bargain powers (a lot of recent open source drivers only became economically viable because of that). I don't know how much worse is the Android-land but most "normal" people are using their mobile devices more than their desktops, the same shift doesn't happened to power users. This made the share of power users on desktop to grow significantly recently, specially after the pandemic. Actually, I partly assign to this the current uptick of the Linux desktop (more than 3% with ChromeOS above 4% recently). We may be a minority, but we are no longer a minority that can be ignored. A share of 7% of under served proficient users is a huge market wanting to be pleased. Vendors can not ignore us any longer. We should not waste our efforts trying to convince M$ not to turn their OS into a ad-infested wastebasket; Let it be! We should concentrate our efforts so that we can comfortably live without depending on M$.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Very true. Go shadow a "normal" user of a web browser without adblocking, and you'll see they spend so much time dismissing popup after popup after popup. It's totally normal to them and doesn't even irritate them. The act of finding and tapping the tiny "X" is practically automatic and second nature. Same for people who don't curate their phone notifications. I was standing in line at a fast food restaurant and had a good look at some guy's phone he left unlocked on one of the tables. It was just notification after notification. Ding, buzz, ding, ding, buzz, ding-ding, ding-ding, buzz-buzz, ding, ding. The top notification area had something displaying there 100% of the time. How can people even live like that? Another example. My elderly parents still watch cable TV. When I visit them, I can't even bear the loud and constant ads, but it doesn't even phase them--they don't even notice them. My brain is about to explode after watching an hour long show. Normal people don't even know of a world without being constantly bombarded with interruptions and messages.
jodrellblank 3y ago
You start off with a maybe interesting point (Matthew 7:3) and then instead of the obvious conclusion "all software / operating systems are full of flaws, their advocates don't notice the familiar ones and do notice other ones" you go for "windows users are dumb hurr hurr"? Isn't the point of your frame of reference story that it's not "headteacher smart, students dumb" but "headteacher attention drawn to different things than student attention"? I aggressively deal with annoyances in Windows, I run Windows 10 Pro in the UK and stay away from cloud services and Edge and Bing so maybe I don't see as many adverts as others? Yet recently on Ubuntu Server I mistyped a Ceph command related to Rados Block Device (rbd), transposing the last two letters I wrote "rdb". Ubuntu told me: user@server:~# rdb Command 'rdb' not found, but there are 22 similar ones. user@server:~# What is anyone supposed to do with that message?? That is incomprehensible that someone would go to the effort of programming that message thinking it was in any way useful. How did that make it past code review and Canonical bundling into mainline Ubuntu server? It can go with the Ubuntu Server installer which, when there's no network connection asks if you want to continue installing without network access and when you say yes the next step prompts for a proxy server address to get to the internet and the step after tries to connect to the internet to apt update - just running through that one single time or even thinking it through is enough to show the problem there, but apparently Canonical developers ... didn't do either? Or the Ubuntu minimized install option which installs without a text editor of any kind despite being a bloaty 6.3GB and managing to include bash, dash, readline, Python3 and Perl, but 1.7MB of vim.tiny is too much; designed by Silicon Valley doofuses with gigabit internet and no idea of the value of a billion bytes? The specks in Windows are barely noticable in comparison to these planks. Or compared to the poor functionality of macOS finder against Windows Explorer. These are among the hundreds of other digital annoyances Linux users put up with all day long which they "don't understand and can't fix" or rather, which their reference frame has excluded from consideration. (see also: Zawinski's Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenager's development model[1] - they're so used to broken software replaced with broken software endlessly that they can't imagine anything else). Wait, which is the speck and which is the plank? The lesson is Linux users/developers dumb hurr hurr, was it? [1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html [edit: have you opened Windows Notepad and pressed F1 for help recently? You'll be greeted with a Bing search for 'get help with notepad in windows'. Who is that supposed to help??].
ankurdhama 3y ago
We know that the non-tech people do check with their tech friend or family member for recommendations. What we all can do is recommend our friends/family member about such thing and move them away from such platforms.

hot_gril 3y ago

Very accurate. Think also about something you use daily but don't care much about. Maybe you have a "point A to B" car that just needs decent MPG. Car equivalent to Windows is a sagging Altima or a screeching Mirage.

xethos 3y ago

> which only works half the time anyway In case it can be as useful for you, or anyone else, as it has been for me: https://www.fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/frm-eng/MMCN-9EZV6S https://www.fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/frm-eng/MMCN-9E...

Derbasti 3y ago

Thank you. This is very true, and equally sad.

marcodiego 3y ago

> It's already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. I have a few points against this. First is that it is not that important if we can revert M$ (yes, sorry, I'll refer to them this way for this comment) behavior, the most important is that we should have alternatives. For that we must push hardware and software vendors to support other OS's, specially Linux. Second is that, by making a choice, we can influence statistics and this influence may be becoming strong enough to give us some bargain powers (a lot of recent open source drivers only became economically viable because of that). I don't know how much worse is the Android-land but most "normal" people are using their mobile devices more than their desktops, the same shift doesn't happened to power users. This made the share of power users on desktop to grow significantly recently, specially after the pandemic. Actually, I partly assign to this the current uptick of the Linux desktop (more than 3% with ChromeOS above 4% recently). We may be a minority, but we are no longer a minority that can be ignored. A share of 7% of under served proficient users is a huge market wanting to be pleased. Vendors can not ignore us any longer. We should not waste our efforts trying to convince M$ not to turn their OS into a ad-infested wastebasket; Let it be! We should concentrate our efforts so that we can comfortably live without depending on M$.

ryandrake 3y ago
Very true. Go shadow a "normal" user of a web browser without adblocking, and you'll see they spend so much time dismissing popup after popup after popup. It's totally normal to them and doesn't even irritate them. The act of finding and tapping the tiny "X" is practically automatic and second nature. Same for people who don't curate their phone notifications. I was standing in line at a fast food restaurant and had a good look at some guy's phone he left unlocked on one of the tables. It was just notification after notification. Ding, buzz, ding, ding, buzz, ding-ding, ding-ding, buzz-buzz, ding, ding. The top notification area had something displaying there 100% of the time. How can people even live like that? Another example. My elderly parents still watch cable TV. When I visit them, I can't even bear the loud and constant ads, but it doesn't even phase them--they don't even notice them. My brain is about to explode after watching an hour long show. Normal people don't even know of a world without being constantly bombarded with interruptions and messages.

jodrellblank 3y ago

You start off with a maybe interesting point (Matthew 7:3) and then instead of the obvious conclusion "all software / operating systems are full of flaws, their advocates don't notice the familiar ones and do notice other ones" you go for "windows users are dumb hurr hurr"? Isn't the point of your frame of reference story that it's not "headteacher smart, students dumb" but "headteacher attention drawn to different things than student attention"? I aggressively deal with annoyances in Windows, I run Windows 10 Pro in the UK and stay away from cloud services and Edge and Bing so maybe I don't see as many adverts as others? Yet recently on Ubuntu Server I mistyped a Ceph command related to Rados Block Device (rbd), transposing the last two letters I wrote "rdb". Ubuntu told me: user@server:~# rdb Command 'rdb' not found, but there are 22 similar ones. user@server:~# What is anyone supposed to do with that message?? That is incomprehensible that someone would go to the effort of programming that message thinking it was in any way useful. How did that make it past code review and Canonical bundling into mainline Ubuntu server? It can go with the Ubuntu Server installer which, when there's no network connection asks if you want to continue installing without network access and when you say yes the next step prompts for a proxy server address to get to the internet and the step after tries to connect to the internet to apt update - just running through that one single time or even thinking it through is enough to show the problem there, but apparently Canonical developers ... didn't do either? Or the Ubuntu minimized install option which installs without a text editor of any kind despite being a bloaty 6.3GB and managing to include bash, dash, readline, Python3 and Perl, but 1.7MB of vim.tiny is too much; designed by Silicon Valley doofuses with gigabit internet and no idea of the value of a billion bytes? The specks in Windows are barely noticable in comparison to these planks. Or compared to the poor functionality of macOS finder against Windows Explorer. These are among the hundreds of other digital annoyances Linux users put up with all day long which they "don't understand and can't fix" or rather, which their reference frame has excluded from consideration. (see also: Zawinski's Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenager's development model[1] - they're so used to broken software replaced with broken software endlessly that they can't imagine anything else). Wait, which is the speck and which is the plank? The lesson is Linux users/developers dumb hurr hurr, was it? [1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html [edit: have you opened Windows Notepad and pressed F1 for help recently? You'll be greeted with a Bing search for 'get help with notepad in windows'. Who is that supposed to help??].

ankurdhama 3y ago

We know that the non-tech people do check with their tech friend or family member for recommendations. What we all can do is recommend our friends/family member about such thing and move them away from such platforms.