What Were They Thinking?

By -
Microsoft Office checks for updates and offers the opportunity to install them when the user starts an Office program: "Yes, now that I've finally sat down to work, I would like to delay another five minutes while you download and install some software!"

What about checking when the user exits an Office program, i.e., when they are done working and the computer will be free for a while?!

Comments

  1. PH10:25 AM

    Do any programs do it that way? Every program I have ever used has either checked for updates at launch (e.g., Notepad++ and iTunes) or not checked at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ken B2:16 PM

    Do you feel the bath water before or after you put the baby in?

    You aren't after all being forced to do it now, and if when you are done you might also be unwilling to wait, since you can't turn your machine off. And consider the case when you were prompted, and decided to do it later. Next time you sit down you might have forgotten. Repeat.

    Many people will react "What? You had a fix and didn't tell me BEFORE I spent hours working?" Are they obviously wrong?

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah12:21 AM

    Ken and Phillip, it is not so much JUST that MS only asks at startup, it is that it is ALSO hard to find out how to do an update later at my convenience. (I've done it several times, but I always forget and have to look it up again.)

    All other Apple programs I use can be updated at once using "Software Update," or in the case of my Anaconda Python installation, using "conda update." My problem with MS is that if I don't update when starting... that's that. (Unless I google once again how to force Office updates on my own.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more