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>I can never remember whether the line or the circle on
>the universal icon for power switches means "ON"--talk about >unintuitable! For the record, if anyone else is baffled, the line is >"On," the circle, "Off." Oh the curse of icons! Why
must we learn a new symbolic language to use computers? On a related
matter, see the essay "The Software Wars" in the current (Jan. 2005) American
Scholar, by Paul De Palma. He teaches math and computer science at Gonzaga
U, and he's wise and witty. He moved to academia from a large
management-consulting firm when, as the one in charge of developing a
database-management system in the mid-80s, he told his superior that what the
boss wanted wouldn't work.
As to current software
bloat, De Palma borrows James Fallows' term, The Vegematic Promise, to write of
"...software that has more features than could be learned in a lifetime....Think
Microsoft Office..." And later, "...the bulk of what constitutes Microsoft Word
appears to be useful primarily to brochure designers and graphic artists.
This unusued cornucopia is not peculiar to Microsoft..."
Hallelujah. I read De
Palma's piece after a futile on-line discussion with Quicken Help when I'd
tried to figure out why Quicken 2005 is so much harder to use than
2001 and earlier versions. Then I looked up his address in the Gonzaga
directory and sent him this:
---
"The Software Wars" in the American Scholar is a delight. A further
plague brought by complexity is that software help desks are helpless -- at
least to a nongeek writer like me. My new computer came with MS Office (trial version, of course) and no button to push saying "I don't want all that stuff." I finally found at BestBuy a less costly way to get Word alone. But Word is awful, for the reasons you list. That's why I'm among the antiquarians who cling to XyWrite: clean, fast, sturdy. ---
Bob
White
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