[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Havoc Pennington]

On 12/12/05, Linus Torvalds <torvalds at osdl.org> wrote:
>
> In other words: your "majority" argument is total and utter BULLSHIT. It
> can be true for any particular feature, but it's simply not true in
> general.
>

BTW, I think the "majority" thing is right there with "confusing to
idiots" as a misrepresentation of how many designers would think about
designing software.

A more typical approach would be to think about particular meaningful
kinds of people. For example, I find that many people who have used
UNIX in the past have similar expectations to yours, and I can think
of zero examples of people who have asked to rebind mouse buttons who
were *not* historical UNIX users.

Now yes, in some autistic/rainman kind of world we might say that even
1 example of a non-UNIX-user who wants to rebind mouse buttons would
make this a useless way to think, since the logical predicate "only
UNIX users want to rebind buttons" then becomes false.

But in the real world this is good guidance and generalizations are
useful. If I want to appeal to UNIX users this is probably on the list
of priorities, otherwise it probably isn't.

Today's campy analogy: I'm not going to sell maternity clothes to men.
Yes there are probably men that wear them, if we want to think in
terms of set theory. But they just aren't the right design focus for
maternity clothes.

> It's a total logical fallacy to think that the intersection of two
> majorities would still be a majority. It is pretty damn rare, in fact,
> because these things are absolutely not correlated.

When people say "majority" sometimes they mean:
 - "people like me"
and sometimes they mean:
 - "a vaguely-specified nontechnical computer user"

and sometimes (best case?) they mean some more specific nontechnical
person that they aren't bothering to really explain.

But I don't think anyone really means that they conducted empirical
research and know that 51% of the earth's population prefers a
particular obscure window manager behavior.

Havoc