Re: DTV antennas?

Hi Jeff,

"Jeff Liebermann" <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:03iv74dd06qrr77v4u1feu1s9iaiq41250@xxxxxxxxxx
The same applies to the target audience of a manual. If you're
writing for a couch potato, with a grammar skool education, the copy
is not going to make a professional programmer very happy. Similarly,
targeting the programmer, is going to make the manual unintelligible
to Joe SixPack. I have some ideas on how to partially solve this
dilemma, but that can wait for another rant.

I've seen this happen with Amazon.Com book reviews -- some get crappy reviews
for what seems pretty clearly due to the reader just not having the
appropriate background to understand/appreciate the text, even when in general
it's quite highly regarded.

I
lost because I had to lookup a few nroff dot commands.

That's the main problem with LaTeX, nroff, and similar markup languages --
unless you use them on a regular basis, most people aren't able to remember
some of the more obscure commands. I spent plenty of hours fighting with
LaTeX due to all the exceptions to the usual rules as well...

What has really happened is that the users of function key driven word
processors (IBM Displaywriter, WordPerfect) and <ctrl> key driven word
processors (Wordstar), have been displaced by GUI driven word
processors.

Yes.

Back in the days when there was still somewhat of a
choice, various tests showed the GUI driven variety to be the slowest,
most error prone, but easiest to learn, of the bunch.

I'm not surprised.

Whether this
constitutes an improvement, is subject to debate.

It's an improvement if the program is still "expert-user friendly," that is,
all those <ctrl>-key driven functions are still available; most people who use
such a piece of software will naturally gravitate towards the shortcut keys.
(...although I've definitely run into the opposite sort of people who seem to
thing the more clicks the better and don't understand why you don't like
having to click a half-dozen times to before a simple function...) Sadly,
more and more software seems to only be "beginning-user friendly" and not
"expert-user friendly."

---Joel


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