PDA

View Full Version : Microsoft Windows XP ~ The Dumbing Down of Windows



muckshifter
09-09-2001, 04:49 PM
While everyone appreciates the efforts of engineers and others to fashion more user friendly products, there is a not so fine line which when crossed, clearly indicates that those same engineers have a low opinion of our fundamental capabilities as sentient beings. By contrast, generally speaking, I hold our abilities to conceive and carry out constructive tasks in high regard. That's just my opinion, but evidence of this can be gleaned by carefully observing various examples of the results of productive behavior: The Great Pyramid of Khufu, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, the Declaration of Independence, Michelangelo's David and Pamela Anderson's protuberances to name but a few magnificent examples. Perhaps we should pass the word on to Microsoft so they may reconsider their basic approach to how they think we will interact with their new operating system, Windows XP.

Windows XP is the dumbing down of Windows. They've removed many of our choices in setting up our working environment, and proportionately increased their ability to invade our privacy and possibly even compromised our safety in the process. Not only is Microsoft clearly unimpressed with our computer manipulating and decision making abilities, it is equally clear that they think that we don't know enough to be concerned about our privacy.

No one likes to be treated like an idiot, and almost everyone has at least something that they would probably prefer to keep away from public view residing somewhere in their computer. Even if they don't, perhaps they just value their privacy on principle. This article makes no judgments as to why you might prefer to keep the contents of your hard drive private. It is simply assumed that you would prefer to keep that which you might reasonably expect to be private away from the scrutiny of others, and additionally that people prefer to be given reasonable choices in determining how their working environments are configured.

http://members.home.net/scotterpops/articles/winxp/winxp1.html

Thanks Scott.

KaraK
09-09-2001, 06:09 PM
i the article he makes a reference to the lack of a custom install option - correct me if I'm wrong but didnt 2k lack this as well ? At least I dont recall ever seeing it.

Once you get into the OS itself as far as I know you can tweak to your hearts content - at least as much as you could in 2k anway.

The interface is kinda annoying.. it would have been a nice option to be able to choose not to have it as default at install time or something.

I'm reserving any major judgements on XP untill I've used it properly really

muckshifter
09-09-2001, 06:25 PM
KaraK, I see you read it through. ;)

I think MS is trying to take out any mishaps from "the new user", as we are a tad more remorseful it should be a good "game" trying to tweak XP to our liking.

:hat:

martzweb
09-10-2001, 07:32 PM
nope., no custom installs in 2k or xp

KaraK
09-11-2001, 07:47 AM
martz:

nice to go I'm not going blind then :goog:


seriously though the removal of the custom install was something I found weird and a minor annoyance. It's not as big an issue as it would have been a year or two ago when HD space was at more of a premium. But the lack of control is still somewhat frustrating for the more competant user and also I can't for the life of me see an advantage in taking it out. Surely the code to handle it would have been a walk in the park.I'm also suprised that the option for choosing the install directory wasnt around in the main setup. You can only access it if you run setup from within an existing copy of windows. Most strange :beatsme: