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[Jules Richardson]

William Donzelli wrote:
>> How much has the sales side changed? I mean, I suspect for a typical 
>> user just
>> doing some word processing etc., a simple bitmapped display is fine - 
>> they
>> don't *need* the high speed of a card that has a lot more features.
> 
> People, including me, want some sort of polish and shine to
> applications.


OK, I'm sitting here staring at a GUI that has faded menu bars. Now I don't 
*need* those - I'm not going to suddenly find it hard to use an application if 
that effect were to disappear. Yet someone's decided to code them in anyway, 
increasing disk footprint, memory footprint, and display redraw time 
unnecessarily.

That's the sort of stuff I'm talking about - there's an awful lot of extras 
thrown into modern software that just isn't required, and even more that isn't 
required *all the time*.

I don't have anything against a well thought out UI - but so often modern 
software seems to be about adding frills, or rolling several applications into 
one and increasing bloat that way when not all users want everything that's in 
the bundle.

 > This is something that most hardcore computer people do
> not understand. The polish and shine are the things that take up the
> computing resources, and generally make using the machines a bit more
> pleasant.

See, it doesn't matter if my menus are a single colour or 523 shades of grey. 
It's a tool, not a work of art. Providing it's easy to use with a little 
learning, I'm happy.

>> Printers are a case in point too - a parallel port does that job just 
>> fine,
>> yet it's hard to find a machine that doesn't have more complicated USB
>> interfaces on it, and a printer's now expected to use that.
> 
> I suspect one reason for this (and a big one as well) is that a USB
> printer is probably cheaper to make. Most of the cost is in the cable
> and sockets, and clearly the USB stuff wins there.

It's perhaps cheaper now that so many printer manufacturers have gone down 
that route. But the level of complexity of a point-to-point parallel system 
must be a lot simpler than a serial bus, surely?

cheers

Jules

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