Re: [Nautilus-list] Usability - death of options 2

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ben Ford <ben kalifornia com> writes:
>  I like knowing that the zip disk won't eject until all writes are
> complete.  I like knowing that my kid can't hit the eject button on
> the CDROM and disrupt whatever I am working on (like she does on my
> wife's win98 machine several times a day).  I like having buffered
> reads and writes that let -me- work faster and smarter, without
> having to wait for the floppy drive to complete writing.

Whether drives are locked while in use is totally orthogonal to
whether you have to mount/unmount them manually. (And Mac requires
manual unmount, note. It does not unmount automatically, and even
locks mounted drives IIRC.)

So see, again an example of my point. You claim you really like
mount/unmount, but then your rationale is about whether the drive is
locked when closed. And mount/unmount is not necessarily the best
solution to that issue. Maybe it is, I don't know. The point of the
story is not to advocate one behavior over another.

The right thing for us as developers or UI designers or whatever is to
see what the issues are that you have (locking the drive, buffering),
and solve those, possibly using preferences, possibly not, as it makes
sense.

But the solution to this problem means nothing about preferences in
general, and their goodness/badness. "Preferences" the abstract
concept is not something you can be for or against.  The only
meaningful stance is a clear argument about where you draw the line
between the thousands of variables that could be preferences and the
subset that are actually in the preferences dialog. I haven't seen any
of the people worried about losing preferences stand up and take such
a stance. Until you do you have nothing to say, because including all
several thousand variables is a nonsense argument. Similarly,
including zero preferences is a nonsense argument. Ergo, being
categorically for or against preferences is nonsense, and any email
that does not draw a line between good preferences and bad preferences
is nonsense.

Havoc