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Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

To me, many of the issues are the computer telling the user about stuff they shouldn't have to worry about. For example, wouldn't cloud computing solve most of these problems by not giving the responsibility for the problem to the user?

Change your battery You shouldn't lose your work if the battery fails

Formatting this volume... People would not do sys. admin themselves like this

Permanent delete With storage so large nowadays, there is no particular reason to delete something for space reasons.

Disk full Shouldn't happen, in the cloud it could never happen, you just get charged more. Gmail for example was designed never to get full.

Checking for software In the cloud it would always be upto. date

Downloading messages progress bar Well with web apps it's either loaded or it's not.

Of course these are not the only problems, but are the type that are most difficult for users because they are more about sys. admin than getting the task done.

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I would like to agree... I can't quite agree with all points

Permanent delete: Believe me, you can fill up anything. Space exists to be filled. Junk multiplies.... XD That said I am looking into deduplicating WORM storage for my own use.

Disk full / charged more: Not an appropriate business model for many customers. It's hard enough to keep a cap on your phone bill where you only have to worry about 2 or 3 factors (time used, time of day, distance). On a disk, god knows what wants to store temporary and permanent files, it's not immediately clear how much space each picture or movie or song file will take...

I disagree, but I can see where you're coming from based on the examples I picked (which were all biased toward operating system maintenance actions, given the source material).

From the point of view of a naive user, there are new types of interactions that can have massive social implications: e.g. changing Facebook relationship status. At the moment, the notification of that status change to the user is pretty minimal. It does not, for example, make clear that that change will be propagated to, say, over 500 people, and all of their contacts.

There may be people who are more concerned about their social standing than whether they've accidentally formatted a volume or not.

Well really the problem with Facebook is that's too complex.

Though I'd agree there are non-sys admin problems that people have, but the worst problems are all sys. admin type ones, viruses, out of space, slowness.

The user-space stuff is nice to have, though the movies tend to have some impressive visualization and lots of data (like floorplans, schematics etc.) in order to show things like that. Facebook could maybe show a picture of your 500 friends and say "sending..." though.

Exactly.

You almost make it sound like it would only show you it's going out to 500 friends _after_ you clicked the button. :D

Well a decent undo would fix that

Undo is good, but I can't help but chuckle at the thought of "Whoops! He's not really my boyfriend" going out to 500 acquaintances 20 seconds after the opposite statement.

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