[Nottingham] Consumer notes

[Martin]

Michael Leuty wrote:

[ Damp Saturday frustrations? ]

> You have to admire a software company that stakes its future on a new 
> product that will require 2Gb RAM to work properly.

And even then not work as 'expected'. (Or properly?)

That 2GB (I'm sure you didn't mean 2 Giga *bits*) is physically not too 
outlandish now. However, it does give frighteningly huge room for 
horrendously badly designed and implemented software!

Room enough for more bloat than a high altitude weather balloon!

[---]
> I was using their word processor at work yesterday, and as my typing 
> drew near to the bottom right corner of the screen a balloon popped up, 
> obscuring the text. This is clearly a new helpful feature to improve my 
[---]

Yes, I get very annoyed when there is patronising INTRUSIVE 'help' 
features to force you to an 'experience' as dictated by the marketing 
types. More so when there is the thinly veiled message that they know 
better for your own good so that they can also grab more of your money 
and your time. Oh, and it really is for your own good and best 
experience, really (or more likely not).

Are there really so many suckers that such squeamish marketing works 
well with? Are our schools really so pathetically bad?!


> Meanwhile, back home where the computing experience is less rich, I have 
> installed SuSE 10.0 RC1. I figured this would probably be about as 
> stable as a Mandrake final release.  ;-)
[---]

This is a good example of where geek development produces a very 
different product to that which is bastardised for marketing purposes.

Perhaps we should compare how we can do some 'honest marketing' to morph 
part of the Linux/FOSS world to become more socially acceptable?


Meanwhile, for my Saturday winges:

#1 I'm blundering through 1st-line support for a certain mobile phone 
company. If you are completely happy with what they impersonally give 
you (for your own good as they continuously remind you), then all is 
good and the world is a good and well adjusted happy place. Make one 
minor mistake and stray from their golden path and henceforth you 
plunged down into the quagmires of hell. Your choice is slow emails from 
India, or 1p per SECOND phone help for the same prevarications... And 
you get a different person every time. All I want to do is simply change 
my username with them to something a lot less finger twisting!

At least their call centre must be smaller than BT's!

#2 Call centres are a real nightmare for everyone. There must be a 
better way of business.


At least the Mandriva here is working well. Not a MS-Virus in sight! 
(Well, apart from all the net noise on port 1026 and a few others, and a 
few thousand ssh attempts from China...)


All good fun.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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