winscape 2340
Amen. This is to bring you a view from this side of things. I have had a harrowing week of hardware problems. It seems there is no end to it, 4 disks have turned...
I'm flabbergasted by the absence of mind...
The 'file' utility that's been with Unix for decades is much smarter and potentially much more reliable than simply looking a part of a filename to determine what might be the format of the content of a file.
But instead of exploiting 'file', and adding a map of applications that knows of a particular file type; something that can be done a application install-patch time; the process is being dumbed-down to simply looking at the file name.
The user is then forced to make a choice of appropriate application. The user has to "guess" which application might open a file satisfactorially; instead of being given the optimum of a choice from a "short list" of applications that advertise that they can open a file recognized by the format of the content.
Once the user makes a choice, the GUI can use that as the default; until the user decides to use another application from the short list.
Do I have to patent the idea before somebody recognizes the bleeding obvious? -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign Economist E*con"o*mist-, n. X against HTML mail One with a ready explanation as to why and postings his last prediction was so wrong
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