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We need more honestly dumb software. - by argent (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Windows Seven’s problem is not that it’s doing the wrong thing, it’s because it’s trying to be too smart about it. It’s not smart. It’s stupid. A laptop computer (running ANY OS) isn’t as smart as a lizard.

But its user’s smart. If your software is stupid (and all software is stupid), and the user is smart (and all users are smarter than their computer, even when they’re stupid) then you’re better off admitting it than trying to fake it.

Instead of popping up a “your battery might be about to fail”, give us a gas gauge. “Your battery has only [====> 40% —-] of original capacity”. Show that for *all* batteries. Let people pop that up even if there’s no problem. Let people be smart about it. Or even… let people be dumb about it.

You might find that people are more willing to replace batteries when they get down to 20%. You might think that’s stupid. And it may be stupid. But it’s still smarter than stupid software trying to be smart.

Wha?? - by Itninja (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
“To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state.” 
 
Can a brother get some restrictive clauses and pronouns up in here?

similar story with Fedora and hard drives - by FranTaylor (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Fedora recently added a feature named palimpsest that checks your hard drive. I did an upgrade and all of a sudden I am getting complaints about my hard drive being close to failure. I think “no way, this is a pretty new drive”. But I dig deeper and sure enough the drive really is bad.

Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives - by Naturalis Philosopho (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Bingo. If there’s any story here, it’s that Microsoft’s reputation is so bad that people won’t believe them even when they’re right. That and that people aren’t very technically minded. I once told my father to us a piece of software to monitor the SMART status on his HDD since it was “making a lot of noise”. He just told me that he’d been doing it. About a year later he said that his laptop would barely run so I visited and noticed that the SMART was telling him that the HDD had irrecoverable errors and should be backed up and replaced immediately. When I asked how long it had been saying that, he replied that it had always said that (or something like it) since he first checked (at my encouragement). He just didn’t think that it could be a real problem since the computer still ran at that time. Let’s face it here, if a person is running Windows, they aren’t going to believe that there’s a problem until they can’t work ‘cause Windows gives alert after alert after alert and how can you know which ones to believe unless you’re a “techie”? Sure if, you’re reading here, you’ll know, but 98% of people just don’t.

Re:almost fooled me… - by ajrs (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

So, Windows 7 is still killing babies?